Challenges of data center thermal management

Abstract

The need for more performance from computer equipment in data centers has driven the power consumed to levels that are straining thermal management in the centers. When the computer industry switched from bipolar to CMOS transistors in the early 1990s, low-power CMOS technology was expected to resolve all problems associated with power and heat. However, equipment power consumption with CMOS has been rising at a rapid rate during the past 10 years and has surpassed power consumption from equipment installed with the bipolar technologies 10 to 15 years ago. Data centers are being designed with 15-20-year life spans, and customers must know how to plan for the power and cooling within these data centers. This paper provides an overview of some of the ongoing work to operate within the thermal environment of a data center. Some of the factors that affect the environmental conditions of data-communication (datacom) equipment within a data center are described. Since high-density racks clustered within a data center are of most concern, measurements are presented along with the conditions necessary to meet the datacom equipment environmental requirements. A number of numerical modeling experiments have been performed in order to describe the governing thermo-fluid mechanisms, and an attempt is made to quantify these processes through performance metrics.

A study on the effect of ground surface boundary conditions in modelling shallow ground heat exchangers

“…As reported by Crawford et al [31] for a building integrated photovoltaic system with heat recovery unit, heat recovery systems have a dominant impact on reducing the payback period of the energy supplying system. Future predictions indicate that the heat recovery systems will play an important role in the energy sector as a consequence of the developments in material sciences and growing significance of environmental issues [32][33][34][35].…”

Simulation of Thermal Distribution and Airflow for Efficient Energy Consumption in a Small Data Centers

“…The β index was proposed to evaluate temperature increase in local racks [42], and can be defined as:…”

“…The temperature symbols are shown in Figure 3. Schmidt tried to solve this problem by proposing the β Index [42]. This index provides information about local temperatures in a rack, and is obtained from the ratio of the punctual temperature difference across a rack to the average difference across the racks.…”

A Review of Heat Pipe Application Including New Opportunities

“…As described in the introduction, a major operational cost of data centers is electric power consumption, and as the power supplied to the data center processing units is ultimately dissipated as heat, a significant fraction of data center power is used to cool these units (Brill, 2010;Schmidt et al, 2005). As shown in Fig.…”

“…As the power supplied to the data center processing units is ultimately dissipated as heat, a significant fraction of data center power is used to cool these units (Brill, 2010;Schmidt et al, 2005). It is estimated that for every watt of power consumed by the computing infrastructure, another one-third to half watt is needed to operate the cooling infrastructure.…”