Minimizing the thermal impact of computing equipment upgrades in data centers

Siriwardana, Jayantha; Halgamuge, Saman K.; Scherer, Thomas; Schott, W.

doi:10.1016/j.enbuild.2012.03.026

Cited by 36 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…The ability to deal with complex flows within built environments has made CFD an important tool in improving building health and safety ( [9], [10]); ensuring thermal comfort for the occupants ( [11], [12]); testing energy efficient designs ( [13], [14]); and applying required environmental conditions ( [15], [16]). …”

Section: Objectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Calibrated CFD simulation to evaluate thermal comfort in a highly-glazed naturally ventilated room

Hajdukiewicz

Geron

Keane

2013

Building and Environment

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Section: Objectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Calibrated CFD simulation to evaluate thermal comfort in a highly-glazed naturally ventilated room

Hajdukiewicz

Geron

Keane

2013

Building and Environment

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“…The term involving is the body force term in the momentum equation due to buoyancy based on the low Mach number Boussinesq approximation, , where T is the fluid temperature [18]. The local equilibrium, , for each velocity direction is based on a local Mach number expansion of the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution up to second order in the fluid velocity, , and is given by the following equation, (8) where wi are weights associated with the lattice and the macroscopic values of density, , and velocity, , are obtained from the following equations (9) The fluid kinematic viscosity, , is fixed based on the collision relaxation time, , the lattice space, , and the time step, t, and is given as (10) Equations (9) are moments of the distribution function and as is common in kinetic theories, it is possible to obtain higher order moments to include the thermal aspects of the fluid flow. However, thermal fluctuations in reality require many more particle velocities and the D3Q19 would therefore be insufficient.…”

Section: Lattice Boltzmann Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This enables air distribution to be optimised to minimise energy consumption whilst ensuring a suitable thermal environment is provided, both in existing and new data centers. CFD has been used successfully to investigate the impact of floor grilles [7], optimise placement of datacom equipment [8] and study the effect of aisle containment [9]. The major challenges in producing accurate models are the multiple length-scales [6], from the chip to the room level, and accurately capturing the various modes of thermal transport and flow regimes present therein [10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Three computational methods for analysing thermal airflow distributions in the cooling of data centres

Boer

Johns

Delbosc³

et al. 2018

HFF

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This paper uses three different numerical simulation technologies to analyse the thermal airflow distribution in a simple example data center layout. The numerical approaches used are based on finite element, finite volume and lattice Boltzmann methods and are respectively implemented via commercial Multiphysics software, opensource CFD code and GPU based code developed by the authors. Each method includes an appropriate turbulence model and the simulation results focus on comparison of the three methods when applied to 2 rows of datacom racks with cool air supplied by a computer room air conditioner and distributed via an underfloor plenum. Good quantitative agreement between the three methods is seen in terms of the inlet temperatures to the Datacom equipment.Key Words: Data center cooling, Lattice Boltzmann, Finite Element, Finite Volume. IntroductionData centers are facilities hosting information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure, usually laid out in rows of 2m tall racks. Their operation provides digital services across a range of sectors. The quantity and density of these ICT systems results in a distributed and complex dynamic generation of heat throughout the facility that needs to be transported away from the ICT, referred to as datacom, equipment. This is usually achieved by air cooling, where the heat is transferred and ultimately rejected to the outside environment. The growth of these facilities has been considerable, with data centers consuming only 0.12% of US energy consumption for the year 2000 [1] and that figure having risen to over 2% only ten years later, in 2010 [2]. Globally this figure is currently closer to 1.5%, at a growth of roughly 11% per year over the last decade [3], and approximately 45% of this energy is used in the removal of heat [4]. Improvements to the energy efficiency of these facilities are rapidly becoming paramount, due to the need to reduce both running costs and environmental impact [5].

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“…This model is widely accepted by many researchers [10][11][12][13][14]. The relationship is expressed as…”

Section: Total Power Consumption Of Data Centermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Banerjee et al [11] integrated the workload assignment approach with cooling system management to achieve energy saving in data centers. Siriwardana et al [12] presented an optimization approach based on Tang's model to find the best equipment upgrading strategy to minimize the impact of new equipment on the existing thermal environment. Meng et al [13] adopted the heat recirculation model to study the cooling consumption with respect to communication cost.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Chip Temperature-Based Workload Allocation for Holistic Power Minimization in Air-Cooled Data Center

Yan

2017

Energies

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Minimizing the energy consumption is a dominant problem in data center design and operation. To cope with this issue, the common approach is to optimize the data center layout and the workload distribution among servers. Previous works have mainly adopted the temperature at the server inlet as the optimization constraint. However, the inlet temperature does not properly characterize the server's thermal state. In this paper, a chip temperature-based workload allocation strategy (CTWA-MTP) is proposed to reduce the holistic power consumption in data centers. Our method adopts an abstract heat-flow model to describe the thermal environment in data centers and uses a thermal resistance model to describe the convective heat transfer of the server. The core optimizes the workload allocation with respect to the chip temperature threshold. In addition, the temperature-dependent leakage power of the server has been considered in our model. The proposed method is described as a constrained nonlinear optimization problem to find the optimal solution by a genetic algorithm (GA). We applied the method to a sample data center constructed with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. By comparing the simulation results with other different workload allocation strategies, the proposed method prevents the servers from overcooling and achieves a substantial energy saving by optimizing the workload allocation in an air-cooled data center.

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Minimizing the thermal impact of computing equipment upgrades in data centers

Cited by 36 publications

References 12 publications

Calibrated CFD simulation to evaluate thermal comfort in a highly-glazed naturally ventilated room

Calibrated CFD simulation to evaluate thermal comfort in a highly-glazed naturally ventilated room

Three computational methods for analysing thermal airflow distributions in the cooling of data centres

Chip Temperature-Based Workload Allocation for Holistic Power Minimization in Air-Cooled Data Center

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