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Power-Aware Cooling Control Architecture for Container Data Center

Authors:
Hiroyoshi Kodama
Masatoshi Ogawa
Hiroshi Endo
Toshio Sugimoto
Hiroyuki Fukuda
Masao Kondo
Jun Tanaka

Keywords: power-aware cooling system; container data center; CRAC; MPC; IPMI; CPU temperature

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a power-aware cooling control architecture is for container data centers. In leading edge data centers, the computer room air conditioning (CRAC) unit controls the temperature and humidity. The CRAC uses large fans to take in hot air and blow out cold air. On the other hand, the server cooling is autonomously controlled with built-in server fans via many temperature sensors in the server. That is, both a large fan outside the server and a small fan in the server contribute to cooling the server. We consider that if a large CRAC fan works mainly with the server cooling fan, the total electric power needed to cool the server can be reduced. For the same air flow, the fan speed of a big fan is less than that of a small fan. Our combined cooling system is based on keeping the temperature of the Central Processing Unit (CPU) fixed. The CRAC fan is controlled following the model predictive control (MPC) using the CPU temperature. The server fan is programmed to a lower speed than the one that would be used by a standard controller by issuing commands to the intelligent platform management interface (IPMI). We verified the proposed system by using an actual container data center. The results show that the proposed system realizes power saving of more than 30% compared to the standard control system. In particular, the power-saving effect of the proposed system is large when the cold aisle is 25°C or more.

Pages: 37 to 41

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2015

Publication date: May 24, 2015

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-412X

ISBN: 978-1-61208-406-0

Location: Rome, Italy

Dates: from May 24, 2015 to May 29, 2015