Four universities are getting a slice of a half a million dollar pie to pursue sustainable computing, and by extent, greener data centers. Those universities are the University of Tennessee, Stanford, Harvard and the University of Oklahoma. According to Earth2Tech, they'll each have a unique area of study like:

Control-Theoretic Power and Performance Management for Green Data Centers; Xiaorui Wang, University of Tennessee. Flipping computing priorities around, this project makes energy the top priority and adjusts hardware and software performance according to power constraints. The system’s power/performance state is optimized with no regard for application-level performance, meaning an operator can’t simultaneously guarantee application performance and power consumption. To deal with this, the project is creating multi-input-multi-output algorithms to create an energy and performance management system.

A good effort. Let's hope it bears fruit.