Computer science Ph.D. student Hrishikesh Amur is one of 23 students nationwide awarded Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenge Grants, the company has announced.

The program rewards the best of those research proposals submitted by students to address 12 different scientific challenges which Yahoo! believes are critical to fueling innovation on the World Wide Web.

Amur, a third-year doctoral student advised by Professor Karsten Schwan, submitted his proposal to address the challenge: "What impact will virtualization, cloud computing and other innovations have upon net and relative energy consumption?" His proposal included previous work on power-proportional distributed file systems, servers with platform low-power states and cooling-driven load migration in the data center done with Schwan and collaborators at Georgia Tech's Center for Experimental Research in Computer Systems (CERCS) and Consortium for Energy Efficient Thermal Management (CEETHERM), as well as at Carnegie Mellon University.

A native of Bangalore, India, Amur earned his bachelor's degree in computer engineering from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka in India. His grant will provide him $5,000 in unrestricted seed funding, in addition to a trip to Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., in September 2010 for a summit with his fellow winners.

For more information about the Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenge program, visit its website.