News release from Hewlett Packard, 15 June, 2009 –

Professor Van P. Carey of UC Berkeley's Mechanical Engineering Department is among 60 professors worldwide to receive awards as part of HP's 2009 Innovation Research Program.

The program, now in its second year, creates opportunities for faculty and students at leading colleges, universities and research institutes around the world to conduct breakthrough collaborative research with HP. Their joint aim: to tackle some of the tech industry’s most complex problems and to push the frontiers of fundamental science. Award winners will work with HP Labs researchers to pursue investigations in areas such as intelligent infrastructure, immersive interaction, sustainability and cloud computing.

Prith Banerjee, HP senior vice president, and director of HP Labs, in announcing the awards, stated that “Fostering this type of collaboration between industry and academia breeds a long-term partnership that is more important now than ever before.” The program, he noted, “allows the company to tap the brightest minds all over the world to tackle the most challenging issues facing the technical community.”

HP reviewed nearly 300 proposals from more than 140 universities in 29 countries on a range of topics within the eight high-impact research themes at HP Labs – analytics, cloud, content transformation, digital commercial print, immersive interaction, information management, intelligent infrastructure and sustainability. This year 60 projects from 46 universities in 12 countries will receive awards. The selected project leaders reflect the global reach of the program: including, faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, the Indian Institute of Technology; Bombay, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST); Carnegie Mellon University; and the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The project led by Professor Carey teams him with HP’s Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab in an effort to develop compact and accurate models of the energy use in data centers -- models that IT managers can use to run their systems more efficiently. Carey’s project was one of a select group to receive second year funding in 2009.

Research during the first year has demonstrated the feasibility of Carey’s new modeling approach. In the project’s second year, Carey’s researcher group at Berkeley will refine the tools that can use these models and test them against the performance of real data centers at HP.

“What sustainability has lacked until now is the application of fundamentals,” explains Chandrakant Patel, HP Fellow and Director and of HP’s Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab, Professor Carey’s research partner at HP. “We need experts like Professor Carey, who can apply fundamentals of thermodynamics and heat transfer to help us create tools that we can use to develop least energy, least materials products and solutions,” explains Patel.

“Working with an acknowledged pioneer in the field,” notes Patel, “isn’t just enabling a new generation of products based on solid metrics. It’s also resulting in papers that the team are publishing in top-tier journals, which helps inform the entire sustainability community.”

The IRP awards have been crucial to the project, he feels. “If we didn’t have the funding from IRP,” Patel suggests, “we wouldn’t be able to attract people like Professor Carey to work on this.”
Carey’s research is conducted in the Energy and Information Technologies (EIT) Laboratory at UC Berkeley, a Lab that Carey founded with seed funding from CITRIS. Carey's research on sustainable energy technologies in the EIT Lab has attracted more that $250K in new funding through grants form The HP Innovation Program, and the UC Discovery program.