Energy and Thermal Management of IT System

Join us for Energy and Thermal Management of IT Systems, an event on Tue, Jan. 13, 2026 at 7-9pm at Covalent Metrology, 925 Thompson Place, Sunnyvale, CA 94085.

We'll have free quality pizza and drinks starting at 6:30pm. Come early and network with our members, other engineers, interested parties, and possible consulting clients.

A Zoom option for this hybrid event is at https://californiaconsultants.org/event/energy-and-thermal-management-of-it-systems/

Description: The latter part of 20th century witnessed the rise of the compute utility made up of large-scale data centers housing densely-packed compute, storage and networking equipment. In the cyber age, data centers became modern day factories requiring megawatts of power for the information technology (IT) equipment, much like the process equipment in a factory of the machine age. Electrical energy supplied to the chips and systems in the data centers turned into multi-megawatts of heat energy which in turn required heat removal means. The active heat removal means also required power.

While many innovative measures have been used for heat removal and energy management in data centers, there is a substantial gap in application of the fundamentals of engineering when compared to the approaches taken by the contributors of the 19th and early 20th century machine age. As an example, machine age contributors performed exergy (2nd law of thermodynamics) analysis and deemed it necessary to build a hydro-electric plant as part of the design of an Aluminum factory. Indeed, the majority of data centers today rely on the power infrastructure built by our predecessors.

Given the inexorable trajectory of data centers strongly driven by AI, and associated demands on available energy, it is time we returned to such fundamentals, particularly given the environmental challenges. This talk will present a holistic approach that traces the energy flow from a power plant to a chip, and from the chip core to the cooling tower.

Bio: Former Senior Fellow and Chief Fellow of HP Inc., Chandrakant Patel is a pioneer in the design of information technology (IT) infrastructures. He is an important player in the design of energy-efficient computing, electronics cooling, and sustainability for data centers. During his 42-year career in Silicon Valley, he has done design work in data storage including disk drives, along with ICs, high-end compute, networking, 3D additive manufacturing, and software.

With his deep passion for fundamentals and workforce development, Chandrakant has also served for over two decades as adjunct faculty in engineering at UC Berkeley, San Jose State Univ., Santa Clara Univ., and Chabot College. He is also an IEEE Fellow, ASME Fellow, member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and is in the Silicon Valley Engineering Council Hall of Fame. He holds 165 US patents and has published over 150 papers.