Title: Sustainable Information Technology Ecosystem

Chandrakant D. Patel
HP Fellow and Director
Sustainable IT Ecosystem Laboratory
HP Laboratories, Palo Alto, California
Time: 2.30 to 3 pm, 9th Jan
Abstract
The drivers of the next generation of information technology (IT) services are the teeming millions who will avail IT services to address their fundamental needs and improve their quality of life. We have the opportunity to transform the world by deconstructing conventional value-chains and replacing them with Sustainable IT services. This transformation can be delivered by an IT ecosystem made up of billions of service oriented client devices and thousands of data centers. We envision the IT ecosystem to enable the next generation of cities, City 2.0, where available energy is managed as a key resource and apportioned based on the need. The supply and demand side management resulting from IT based business models, and through measurement, communications and control will enable many societal and business activities to take place while providing a net positive impact on the environment compared to conventional business models. Indeed, we cannot expect to meet the needs of the society by solely relying on extending the physical infrastructure to cope with the economic and population growth. Consider the Indian Railways system which provides a superb gateway for those with Internet access to save a considerable amount of time, and consume much less available energy, by purchasing tickets online. Imagine the scale that can be achieved by enabling the 700 million in India to have the same online access to railway reservations and secure banking transactions. To achieve this scale, the cost of IT services needs to be reduced. We contend that addressing sustainability with a “cradle to cradle” perspective – minimizing available energy needed for extraction, manufacturing, waste mitigation, transportation, operation and reclamation – will result in achieving the total cost of ownership that will bring the millions into the IT ecosystem. In this talk, we present the technical approach in least energy, least material design of the IT ecosystem with a focus on building sustainable data centers that achieve the targeted total cost of ownership.

About the speaker
Chandrakant Patel is an HP Fellow and Director of the Sustainable IT Ecosystem Laboratory. The laboratory is focused on the creation of a sustainable IT ecosystem with the goal of driving the reduction of carbon emissions throughout the global economy. Patel’s supply and demand side approach in creating a sustainable IT ecosystem builds on his pioneering work in the late 1990s on holistically managing available energy as a key resource in data centers. He initiated research in “smart” data centers, emphasizing that the “data center is the computer” and it requires a management system that enables dynamic provisioning of compute, power and cooling resources based on the need. The research resulted in a suite of products and services from HP. Patel has played a key role in establishing HP's leadership in energy-efficient computing by founding the HP Labs' thermal technology research program in the early 1990s, and subsequently the data-center architecture program. He foresaw the thermal-management challenges associated with high power density due to miniaturization in semiconductor technologies, and the need to manage energy as enterprise IT system resources became increasingly connected and shared. Patel joined HP Labs in 1991, initially leading the cooling and packaging research of the Wide Word microprocessor. This research contributed to what later became Intel's Itanium, which represented the next generation of microprocessors. In addition to his work at HP, Patel has taught computer-aided design as an adjunct faculty member at Chabot College in Hayward, California, undergraduate and graduate-level thermal management courses at University of California, Berkeley Extension, Santa Clara University and San Jose State University. He has authored over 100 papers and has been granted more than 95 U.S. patents. He is a Senior Member of IEEE. Patel has been honored as a distinguished alumnus by the City College of San Francisco, and by the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department at San Jose State University. In 2005, he received the Joel S. Birnbaum Prize – awarded for contributions to HP or HP Labs that demonstrate extraordinary vision, perseverance, innovation and creativity – for "visualizing and leading the creation of end-to-end solutions for managing the energy requirements for computation, thereby positioning HP as a leader in physical design of datacenters." Patel has also been profiled by ABC-KGO television in its Emmy Award winning series “Profiles of Excellence” for contributions to science, technology and education.

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