Chandrakant D. Patel

Chandrakant Patel is an HP Fellow and director of the Sustainable IT Ecosystem Laboratory at HP Labs. The laboratory is focused on the creation of a sustainable IT ecosystem with the goal of driving the reduction of carbon emissions throughout the global economy.  Patel's supply and demand side approach in creating a sustainable IT ecosystem builds on his pioneering work in the late 1990s on holistically managing available energy as a key resource in data centers.  He initiated research in "smart" data centers, emphasizing that the "data center is the computer" and it requires a management system that enables dynamic provisioning of compute, power and cooling resources based on the need.   The research resulted in a suite of products and services from HP.

Patel has played a key role in establishing HP's leadership in energy-efficient computing by founding the HP Labs' thermal technology research program in the early 1990s, and subsequently the data-center architecture program.  He foresaw the thermal-management challenges associated with high power density due to miniaturization in semiconductor technologies, and the need to manage energy as enterprise IT system resources became increasingly connected and shared.

Patel joined HP Labs in 1991, initially leading the cooling and packaging research of the Wide Word microprocessor. This research contributed to what later became Intel’s Itanium processor, which represented the next generation of microprocessors.

In addition to his work at HP, Patel has taught computer-aided design as an adjunct faculty member at Chabot College in Hayward, California, undergraduate and graduate-level thermal management courses at University of California, Berkeley Extension, Santa Clara University and San Jose State University.

A Fellow of IEEE, he has authored many refereed journal and conference papers and has been granted more than 95 U.S. Patents.

Patel has been honored as a distinguished alumnus by the City College of San Francisco and by the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at San Jose State University.

Patel has also been profiled by ABC-KGO television in its Emmy Award winning series "Profiles of Excellence" for contributions to science, technology and education.