This summer, the Center for E3S is hosting over 30 students and faculty from across the country to conduct research at both MIT and at UC Berkeley.  Welcome students and faculty! Best of luck on your summer work.

The research agenda this year reflects the Center’s growing focus on the gap between theoretical device efficiency and the real-world power budgets of large-scale computing. As digital services continue to expand, the electricity consumed by the infrastructure behind them has become one of the defining engineering problems of the decade. E3S’s work on low-voltage transistors and tunnel-FET architectures speaks directly to that problem.

The demand side of the equation helps frame why the work matters. Video streaming platforms, online sports betting services, and cloud-based productivity tools each drive sustained compute loads across millions of concurrent sessions. Reducing the per-operation energy cost at the transistor level compounds across those workloads in ways that translate to measurable grid-level savings. Several of the summer projects will model exactly that kind of scaling analysis.

Students arriving at MIT will have access to the Center’s fabrication facilities, while those based at UC Berkeley will work more closely with the simulation and modeling teams. Both groups will present their findings at the annual E3S review in the fall, where industry partners and program officers evaluate the Center’s progress toward its long-term efficiency targets.

We look forward to sharing updates on their work as the summer progresses.