The US Department of Energy (DOE) has announced up to $42 million in funding to help develop high-performance energy efficient cooling solutions for data centers.

The DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) agency will run the program, titled the 'Cooling Operations Optimized for Leaps in Energy, Reliable and Carbon Hyperefficiency for Information Processing Systems (COOLERCHIPS).'

COOLERCHIPS aims to develop highly efficient and reliable cooling systems that will enable "a new class of efficient power-dense computational systems, data centers, and modular systems."

The program will focus on four key areas:

• Energy-efficient cooling solutions for next generation high power density servers
• High power density modular data centers that can be operated anywhere efficiently
• Software and modeling tool development to design and optimize data centers’ energy use, CO2 footprint, reliability, and cost, simultaneously
• Facilities and best practices for efficient evaluation and demonstration of transformational technologies developed under the program.

“Extreme weather events, like the soaring temperatures much of the country experienced this summer, also impact data centers which connect critical computing and network infrastructure and must be kept at certain temperatures to remain operational,” said US Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm.

“Creating solutions to cool data centers efficiently and reduce the associated carbon emissions supports the technological breakthroughs needed to fight climate change and secure our clean energy future.”