ABSTRACT
The rapid proliferation of information technology (IT) continues to increase the number of computing devices, their supporting infrastructure, and the overall energy consumption. At the chip level, a dramatic increase in wire resistance, increasing device density, and the emerging 3-D integration is conspiring to make power densities unsustainable and heat removal very difficult [1,2]. Because of increasing miniaturization and computing power, similar issues arise at higher levels as well. For example, the tight form factors of blade servers, notebooks, and PDAsmake heat dissipation very challenging to manage. Cooling limitations essentially limit the amount of power that the device can consume. For mobile devices, the increasingly sophisticated processing stresses the battery life further. At the global level, it is expected that in spite of aggressive efforts at enhancing power efficiency of computing systems, total IT power consumption is likely to continue to go up [3] and so is the electricity cost associated with running large data centers.
