As the demand on Internet services drastically increases in recent years, the power used by Internet Data Centers (IDCs) has been skyrocketing. How to reduce the power consumptions of IDCs while still providing guaranteed service to end users is a primary concern for IDC operators. In this talk, Professor Liu will first share some challenges and associated opportunities for Internet Data Center power management. He will discuss the power management complexities focusing on micro-level power efficient designs and macro-level resource management, including the hardware, device, software infrastructure and services. He will then present his recent work on the co-design of data centers and smart grid. Specifically, he will discuss MEC-IDC, a new scheme leveraging the location diversity and time diversity of electricity prices to help minimize the total electricity cost of Internet data centers in the multi-electricity market environment. MEC-IDC exploits both the data center level load balancing, and server-level power control. This work motivates the recent research on Geographical Load Balancing for Green IT management. The talk is based on his recent publications in IEEE INFOCOM, and IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid.
Xue Liu is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He is also affiliated to the Department of ECE, Centre for Intelligent Machines (CIM), and Centre for Advanced Systems & Technologies in Communications (SYTACom). Before that, he was the Samuel R. Thompson Chaired Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. Professor Liu obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006. He obtained his B.S. degree in Mathematics and M.S. degree in Automatic Control both from Tsinghua University, China. His research interests are in real-time and embedded systems, data centers and Internet technologies, cyber-physical systems, and software reliability. Dr. Liu has been granted 1 US patent and filed 4 other US patents, and published more than 100 research papers in major peer-reviewed international journals and conference proceedings, including the Year 2008 Best Paper Award from IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, and the first place best paper award from the Fourth ACM Conference on Wireless Network Security (WiSec’11). Dr. Liu’s research has been reported by news media including the New York Times, NewScientist, CBC, MIT Technology Review’s Blog, The Register, Yahoo news, Slashdot etc. Dr. Liu’s past and ongoing research is supported by NSERC (Discovery, Strategic, CRD), National Science Foundation, Canadian Foundation for Innovation, FQRNT, CRIAQ, Amazon, Bombardier, Thales, MDEIE etc. He received the Ray Ozzie Fellowship, the Saburo Muroga Fellowship, the Mavis Memorial Fund Award, and the C. W. Gear Outstanding Graduate Award from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.