Workload management for air-cooled data centers: An energy and exergy based approach

Techno-Economic Analysis of Waste Heat Utilization in Data Centers: Application of Absorption Chiller Systems

“…A variety of studies have been published exploring cooling technologies for thermal management in data centers [17][18][19]. A common practice to form hot and cold aisles in data centers is to place server racks back to back and front to front in an open-aisle (OA) air-cooled configuration [20].…”

Energy, exergy and computing efficiency based data center workload and cooling management

“…Therefore, this consideration is beyond the scope of the present work. The total chilled water flow 𝑄 ̇𝑤 is fixed to a constant value of 15 GPM, since the optimal values are not sensitive to the water flow [21]. The optimization problems are multi-dimensional with both linear and nonlinear constraints.…”

“…The temperature distribution in the cold chamber of an air-cooled DC is an essential feature of the cooling infrastructure. The thermal reliability of a server depends on the cold air intake temperature, which is very sensitive to the zonal utilization levels of servers 𝑢 𝑖,𝑗 𝑧 and cooling parameters 𝑇 𝑐,𝑤 and 𝑄 ̇𝑎 [21]. Instead of examining the entire cold chamber temperature to assess thermal characteristics, we consider the metric active server temperature distribution (𝐴𝑆𝑇𝐷) [39],…”

“…Recent investigations demonstrate the benefits of an exergy-based approach to select cooling architecture [6] and manage workload in air-cooled DCs [21]. The former advocates for the benefits of a modular DC cooling architecture over legacy raised-floor DCs, showing a 23% increase in the effective cooling capacity.…”

“…Scaling up from a single-rack DC to a multi-rack system alters the airflow and thermal dynamics significantly. Because there are shared hot and cold airspaces in a multi-rack infrastructure, one-dimensional workload distributions obtained for a single-rack system cannot be scaled up for multi-rack DCs [21,22]. Thus, workload distributions that vary in two dimensions must be obtained.…”