Renewable and cooling aware workload management for sustainable data centers
Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGMETRICS/PERFORMANCE joint international conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems
CoMETC: Coordinated management of energy/thermal/cooling in servers
ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES)
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A large portion of the power consumption of data centers can be attributed to cooling. In dynamic thermal management mechanisms for data centers and servers, thermal setpoints are typically chosen statically and conservatively, which leaves significant room for improvement in the form of improved energy efficiency. In this paper, we propose two hierarchical thermal-aware power optimization techniques that are complementary to each other and achieve (i) lower overall system power with no performance penalty or (ii) higher performance within the same power budget. At the data center level, we trade off facility Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) power with server fan power by choosing between two thermal setpoints for the HVAC chiller based on the cooling zone utilization levels. This optimization can reduce total data center total power by as much as 12.4%-17%, with no performance penalty. At the server level, we trade off fan power and circuit leakage power by dynamically adjusting the server thermal setpoint, allowing the system to heat up when this saves more fan power than it costs in terms of leakage power. We evaluate this optimization on an IBM POWER 750 and find that it reduces total server power by up to 5.4% with no performance penalty for workloads that heavily exercise a server.