HT-FED2004-56528 DEVELOPMENT AND EXPERIMENTAL VALIDATION OF AN EXERGY-BASED COMPUTATIONAL TOOL FOR DATA CENTER THERMAL MANAGEMENT

ABSTRACT The recent miniaturization of electronic devices and compaction of computer systems will soon lead to data centers with power densities of the order of 300 W/ft 2 . At these levels, traditional thermal management techniques are unlikely to suffice. To enable the dynamic smart cooling systems necessary for future data centers, an exergetic approach based on the second law of thermodynamics has recently been proposed. However, no experimental data related to this concept is currently available. This paper discusses the development and subsequent validation of an exergy-based computer model at an instrumented data center in Palo Alto, California. The study finds that when appropriately calibrated, such a computational tool can successfully predict information about local and global thermal performance that cannot be perceived intuitively from traditional design methods. Further development of the concept has promising potential for efficient data center thermal management

From Chip to Cooling Tower Data Center Modeling:

The chiller cooled data center environment consists of many interlinked elements that are usually treated as individual components. This chain of components and their influences on each other must be considered in determining the benefits of any data center design and operational strategies seeking to improve efficiency, such as temperature controlled fan algorithms. Using the models previously developed by the authors, this paper extends the analysis to include the electronics within the rack through considering the processor heat sink temperature. This has allowed determination of the influence of various cooling strategies on the data center coefficient of performance. The strategy of increasing inlet aisle temperature is examined in some detail and found not to be a robust methodology for improving the overall energy performance of the data center, while tight temperature controls at the chip level consistently provide better performance, yielding more computing per watt of cooling power. These findings are of strong practical relevance for the design of fan control algorithms at the rack level and general operational strategies in data centers. Finally, the impact of heat sink thermal resistance is considered, and the potential data center efficiency gains from improved heat sink designs are discussed

Local temperature control in data center cooling,” Hewlett Packard Laboratories

data center cooling, smart cooling, local temperature control, vent tile, correlation matrix A data center is a computer room containing a dense aggregation of commodity computing, networking and storage hardware mounted in industry standard racks. With the evolution of microprocessor fabrication technology and the increasing demand of internet, power density has been growing from the chip level to the data center level. As a result, mechanical designers face the challenge of handling heat dissipation efficiently in a data center. This paper demonstrates the possibility of optimizing local temperature distribution using vent tiles. In the proposed experiments, the relationship between rack inlet temperature and vent tile configuration is analyzed, and used to demonstrate the effectiveness of a local control algorithm through a control simulation