Cheaper way to deal with the waste heat at data centers?

At any given moment, millions of financial transactions, e-mail, and online videos may be coursing through the circuitry of one of the massive computer server farms that have proliferated in the Internet age.

In Alfonso Ortega's thinking, it's a lot of hot air. He's not talking about spam.

The Internet generates a huge amount of waste heat, said Ortega, a Villanova University professor of energy technology.

By some estimates, 3 percent of the nation's electricity is devoted to computer processing and data centers, enough to light up a couple of states. The cost of cooling the equipment nearly equals the cost of powering the computers that process the bits and bytes, said Ortega, who is also the college of engineering's associate dean for graduate studies and research.

"People started to pay attention when companies said, 'Wow, unbelievable, we're now eating up half of our costs just to keep this thing cool,' " he said.

Ortega's Villanova team, along with a consortium of four other universities and four area corporate partners, were recently awarded a five-year, $3.4 million grant by the National Science Foundation to study ways to improve energy usage at data centers. The effort is formally called the Industry/University Cooperative Research Center in Energy-Efficient Electronic Systems.

While other researchers are looking at the efficiency of computer hardware - the lead institution is Binghamton University - Villanova's expertise is in thermodynamics. Ortega wants to explore ways to reduce or reuse the gales of waste heat generated by data centers, which is now dissipated into the atmosphere by air-conditioners.

Ortega envisions reusing the heat to warm offices, or nearby greenhouses. But in reality, hot air from computer equipment is not "high-quality" thermal energy, and it is difficult to recover usable heat or electricity from it.

Rather, researchers are looking at developing control mechanisms to rapidly shift processing loads to other data centers to take advantage of cheaper electric rates or cooler climates.

They are also developing sensors to identify the hottest servers to target with cooling, which would be more efficient than air-conditioning an entire building.

"There are many different opportunities for efficiency," said Ortega. "Some are obvious, some not so obvious."