The new Department of Energy (DOE) grants in the USA were announced recently. The total funding was $47 million, it will require matching money from the industry involved, which will bring the total expenditures up to over $100 million.

The funding will cover the full data center ecosystem, from facility cooling to software that helps cut the drain of idle hardware. IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Centre has received two awards, one for developing facility-scale liquid cooling, the other for monitoring and controlling cooling systems. Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs will get two as well, for developing methods to monitor network-wide traffic flows in order to optimize power use, and another for liquid cooling systems.

Hewlett-Packard's award will go towards the development of an integrated, modular server unit that integrates the cooling and power conversion hardware into the unit. Yahoo will get one to help it build one of its passive-cooling data centres.

Some of the more interesting projects are going to smaller companies and the academic world. Santa Clara's SeaMicro will be testing physicalized servers with hundreds of processors that may see a 75% energy saving. Caltech will get money to develop software for load balancing across multiple data centres. Columbia University will be getting an award to develop technology for making better use of power once it's on the CPU; the plan is to make better use of the power the CPU receives, cutting losses by 10%.