Dr. Natarajan Gautam, associate professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Texas A&M University, will give a talk Monday (Sept 28) at 3 p.m. in Room 203 of the Zachry Engineering Center on campus.

Dr. Natarajan Gautam

Gautam’s lecture, “Optimizing Energy Consumption in Data Centers,” is part of the department’s seminar series sponsored by Parson’s Corp.

Abstract
Energy consumption in industries around the globe can be significantly reduced by controlling operations in existing systems. We begin by broadly describing the scope for energy savings across several industries including data centers, commercial buildings, food packaging, hospitality, etc. Then we describe in detail the problem of controlling resources in data centers that are notorious for inefficiently consuming a phenomenal amount of energy. Data centers typically consist of hundreds to thousands of servers that are not always doing useful work. To conserve energy in data centers, we formulate a dynamic resource management problem that optimally powers servers on or off (cluster sizing), moves applications (using virtualization), and controls server speeds (by dynamic voltage scaling). The key element here is to strike a balance between energy conservation, quality of service, and reliability in a cost-effective manner. We will describe several approaches to solve the resource management problem but focus on a semi-Markov decision process model for a large portion of the seminar.

Biography
Dr. Natarajan Gautam is an associate professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Prior to joining Texas A&M in 2005, he was on the industrial engineering faculty at Penn State University for eight years. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in operations research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his B.Tech. in mechanical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (Madras) in 1993.

Gautam’s interests are in optimal design, control and performance evaluation of stochastic systems, with a recent emphasis on energy and biology. He directs the Group for Research on Engineering ENergy-efficiency (GREEN). The seminar is based on joint work with former students and Assistant Professor Lewis Ntaimo with whom he is working on an NSF grant on the topic.

Submitted by Katherine Edwards, kedwards@tamu.edu

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