A Computer Scientist Looks at the Energy Problem

Randy Howard Katz
UC Berkeley

Monday, February 8, 2010 at 1:00PM
54-134 Engineering IV Building
Refreshments Served

Abstract: In this talk, we describe LoCal, a research project at Berkeley that applies the lessons of the Internet, for building distributed and robust communications infrastructures, to a new architecture for energy generation, distribution and sharing. We introduce the concept of packetized energy, where energy is allocated among suppliers and consumers in discrete quantities. Like the Internet, quality is achieved end-to-end via protocols over a best-effort, resilient and scalable infrastructure. Distributed management and storage enables dramatic reductions in peak-to-average energy consumption, influencing infrastructure provisioning and investment, and enabling a virtuous cycle of power-limited design. Our architectural building block, intelligent power switching, permits use of diverse, even non-traditional energy storage. Rather than replacing the grid, we overlay it, providing independence from existing generation and transmission systems. Initial efforts are underway to integrate renewal generation resources, like windmills, and adaptive buildings, like Soda Hall at Berkeley, to the LoCal architecture.

Biography: Randy Howard Katz received his undergraduate degree from Cornell, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Berkeley. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1983, where since 1996 he has been the United Microelectronics Corporation Distinguished Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2007, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Helsinki. He has published over 250 refereed technical papers, book chapters, and books. His textbook, Contemporary Logic Design, has sold over 100,000 copies in two editions, and has been used at over 200 colleges and universities. He has supervised 47 M.S. theses and 39 Ph.D. dissertations. His recognitions include thirteen best paper awards, three best presentation awards, the Outstanding Alumni Award of the Computer Science Division, the CRA Outstanding Service Award, the Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award, the CS Division's Diane S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Decoration, the IEEE Reynolds Johnson Information Storage Award, the ASEE Frederic E. Terman Award, the IEEE James H. Mulligan Jr. Education Medal, the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award, and the ACM Sigmobile Outstanding Contributor Award. In the late 1980s, with colleagues he developed Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID). While on leave for government service in 1993-1994, he established whitehouse.gov and connected the White House to the Internet. His current research interest is the architecture of Internet Datacenters, particularly frameworks for datacenter-scale instrumentation and resource management.