Chandrakant Patel

Chandrakant Patel is responsible for strategically engaging in thermo-mechanical research for future microprocessors, workstations, servers and data centers.

In the early 90s, he led the cooling and packaging research of wide word microprocessor at HP Labs. The research work became the Intel-HP I/A 64 (Itanium) project, the next generation of microprocessors.

Subsequently, he established the thermal technology research program at Hewlett Packard Laboratories. With partners in the product R&D groups, he started a virtual thermal community -- the vibrant HP Cool team. Through the 90s, he charted the directions in cooling that led to research in innovative chip and system cooling techniques, and examination of data center cooling as closely as the computer, a project called "the data center is the computer."

His interest today is research in energy used by data center cooling resources at a global level through the HP Labs smart cooling proposition. The smart cooling vision is to dynamically provision cooling commensurate with the heat loads in a data center, and to provision computing, and thus the heat loads, based on the available cooling resources. Chandrakant and his team are exploring the "smart" data center that integrates power, cooling and system architecture.

The vision is to realize a savings of 50 percent in cooling energy costs in the global data center network of tomorrow through combination of mechanical thermo-fluids engineering and computer science.

Prior to joining HP Labs, Chandrakant worked on design of rigid disc drives at HP, Personal Computer Group and at Memorex/Unisys Large Disc Drive Division. He designed disc file actuators, head disc assemblies and implemented the damage boundary method, developed at the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey, to fragility assessment of hard discs.

Chandrakant has been teaching CAD as an adjunct faculty member at Chabot College in Hayward, California since 1990. Together with his colleague, Cullen Bash, he teaches a three-day course in thermal management of electronics and systems at the University of California at Berkeley Extension.

He has authored several refereed journal and conference papers in the area of electronics cooling and has been granted over 90 U.S. patents, several pending. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Components and Packaging Technologies.

Chandrakant got his BSME from University of California, Berkeley, MSME from San Jose State University and is a registered professional mechanical engineer in the state of California.