Amazon AWS: George Mason University and AWS jointly develop a data center engineering course

A data center engineering course is being created by George Mason University in Fairfax County, Virginia, and Amazon Web Services (AWS). The faculty of Mason's College of Engineering and Computing will offer the course, which will be titled ME/ECE 499: Data Center Engineering. It will be accessible to students beginning in September 2023. In addition to learning how to design, operate, and maintain the infrastructure in a data center, students can tour nearby facilities.

Students will hear from industry professionals discussing the various data center career paths. The course is co-organized by Liza Durant, associate dean for strategic initiative and community engagement in the College of Engineering and Computing, and Kammy Sanghera, executive director of the Institute for Digital Innovation.

The collaboration with AWS results from AWS's challenge and funding of Mason students to construct an evaporative cooler and evaluate its effectiveness in a "capstone project." The upcoming fall semester will feature two additional capstone projects, one of which will involve the construction of a data center power monitoring system.

The initial announcement of the AWS-Mason education project was made in November 2022. Mason uses AWS's technical solutions to serve its students as well. The university is incorporating enhanced high-performance computing (HPC) and machine learning technology, among others, from the cloud computing titan.