Power Management Techniques for Data Centers: A Survey

With growing use of internet and exponential growth in amount of data to be stored and processed (known as 'big data'), the size of data centers has greatly increased. This, however, has resulted in significant increase in the power consumption of the data centers. For this reason, managing power consumption of data centers has become essential. In this paper, we highlight the need of achieving energy efficiency in data centers and survey several recent architectural techniques designed for power management of data centers. We also present a classification of these techniques based on their characteristics. This paper aims to provide insights into the techniques for improving energy efficiency of data centers and encourage the designers to invent novel solutions for managing the large power dissipation of data centers.Comment: Keywords: Data Centers, Power Management, Low-power Design, Energy Efficiency, Green Computing, DVFS, Server Consolidatio

Simulation-based assessment of thermal aware computation of a bespoke data centre

The role of Data Centres (DCs) as global electricity consumers is growing rapidly due to the exponential increase of computational demand that modern times require. Control strategies that minimize energy consumption while guaranteeing optimal operation conditions in DC are essential to achieve sustainable and energy efficient DCs. Unfortunately, the development and testing of novel control strategies are often slowed down, if not discarded. This is generally due to the lack of access caused by safety and economic reasons. Alternatively, simulation experiments represent a “safe” virtual environment to test novel control strategies, accelerating the process for their implementation in physical DCs. The virtual DC testbed, originated in the GENiC project, supports the development and dynamic testing of control and energy management algorithms. This paper introduces its features and describes its functionality through a simulation-based assessment of thermal aware computation strategy. For this, the virtual DC will be based on a bespoke DC located in Cork (Ireland). This DC has 30 kW capacity, 40 m2 floor area and its layout follows a hot aisle - cold aisle arrangement without containment. The performance the IT Workload allocation under different scenarios and their influence both on the whitespace environment and overall DC performance are evaluated and quantified. Finally, the benefits of a coordinated operation between the thermal and the IT workload managements are discussed

Toward sustainable data centers: a comprehensive energy management strategy

Data centers are major contributors to the emission of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and this contribution is expected to increase in the following years. This has encouraged the development of techniques to reduce the energy consumption and the environmental footprint of data centers. Whereas some of these techniques have succeeded to reduce the energy consumption of the hardware equipment of data centers (including IT, cooling, and power supply systems), we claim that sustainable data centers will be only possible if the problem is faced by means of a holistic approach that includes not only the aforementioned techniques but also intelligent and unifying solutions that enable a synergistic and energy-aware management of data centers. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive strategy to reduce the carbon footprint of data centers that uses the energy as a driver of their management procedures. In addition, we present a holistic management architecture for sustainable data centers that implements the aforementioned strategy, and we propose design guidelines to accomplish each step of the proposed strategy, referring to related achievements and enumerating the main challenges that must be still solved.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Implementation and demonstration of a building simulation based testbed for assessment of data centre multi-domain control strategies

The traditional data centre (DC) infrastructure is beingsignificantly extended by modern information technology(IT) trends on one side, and lasting calling for DCsustainability on the other. A holistic DC managementwill be necessary to coordinate different DC processesand to dock the DC environment into modern cities anddistrict infrastructure. A development of such a complexmanagement requires comprehensive testing possibilities.The testing is hardly possible on the real DC infrastructuredue to the mission critical nature. Building energymodelling methods offer a suitable platform for thedevelopment of a safe and reliable testing environment.This paper deals with new application of Building EnergySimulation (BES) method and introduces a workflow forvirtual closed-loop testing of enhanced multi-domainoperation for data centres<br/

Minimizing Thermal Stress for Data Center Servers through Thermal-Aware Relocation

A rise in inlet air temperature may lower the rate of heat dissipation from air cooled computing servers. This introduces a thermal stress to these servers. As a result, the poorly cooled active servers will start conducting heat to the neighboring servers and giving rise to hotspot regions of thermal stress, inside the data center. As a result, the physical hardware of these servers may fail, thus causing performance loss, monetary loss, and higher energy consumption for cooling mechanism. In order to minimize these situations, this paper performs the profiling of inlet temperature sensitivity (ITS) and defines the optimum location for each server to minimize the chances of creating a thermal hotspot and thermal stress. Based upon novel ITS analysis, a thermal state monitoring and server relocation algorithm for data centers is being proposed. The contribution of this paper is bringing the peak outlet temperatures of the relocated servers closer to average outlet temperature by over 5 times, lowering the average peak outlet temperature by 3.5% and minimizing the thermal stress

Energy Efficiency in Data Centres and the Barriers to Further Improvements: An Interdisciplinary Investigation

Creation, storage and sharing of data throughout the world is rapidly increasing alongside rising demands for access to the internet, communications and digital services, leading to increasing levels of energy consumption in data centres. Steps have already been taken towards lower energy consumption, however there is still some way to go. To gain a better understanding of what barriers there are to further energy saving, a cross-section of industry representatives were interviewed. Generally, it was found that efforts are being made to reduce energy consumption, albeit to varying degrees. Those interviewed face various problems when attempting to improve their energy consumption including financial difficulties, lack of communication, tenant/landlord type relationships and physical restrictions. The findings show that the data centre industry would benefit from better access to information such as which technologies or management methods to invest in and how other facilities have reduced energy, along with a greater knowledge of the problem of energy consumption. Metrics commonly used in the industry are not necessarily helping facilities to reach higher levels of energy efficiency, and are not suited to their purpose. A case study was conducted to critically assess the Power Utilisation Effectiveness (PUE) metric, the most commonly used metric, through using open source information. The work highlights the fact that whilst the metric is valuable to the industry in terms of creating awareness and competition between companies regarding energy use, it does not give a complete representation of energy efficiency. Crucially the metric also does not consider the energy use of the server, which forms the functional component of the data centre. By taking a closer look at the fans within a server and by focussing on this hidden parameter within the PUE measurement, experimental work in this thesis has also considered one technological way in which a data centre may save energy. Barriers such as those found in the interviews may however restrict such potential energy saving interventions. Overall, this thesis has provided evidence of barriers that may be preventing further energy savings in data centres and provided recommendations for improvement. The industry would benefit from a change in the way that metrics are employed to assess energy efficiency, and new tools to encourage better choices of which technologies and methodologies to employ. The PUE metric is useful to assess supporting infrastructure energy use during design and operation. However when assessing overall impacts of IT energy use, businesses need more indicators such as life cycle carbon emissions to be integrated into the overall energy assessment