ITR: Energy and Thermal Management for Data Centers

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

Trends in Internet infrastructure drive a shift toward service-based computing. Internet-based service providers are adding new data center capacity for a variety of services including Web hosting, application services, outsourced storage, electronic markets, and other network services. In these large scale and rapidly evolving data centers, one of the most important challenges is the energy and thermal problem. Data centers typically have very high power requirement, which significantly increases the difficulty of deploying and expanding a data center due to the need for a large power generation infrastructure. Moreover, high power consumption can result in high electricity bills and negative environmental implications. Another consequence of power consumption is heat dissipation. A recent report shows that heat density per product footprint in a data center increases around 28% per year, increasing the cooling costs for air conditioning. If the temperature is not cooled down effectively, excessive heat can cause malfunctions of many devices and even shutdown of the entire data center. The proposed research addresses the above problem. More specifically, we investigate innovative energy and thermal management schemes for data centers with an emphasis on back-end storage, which is one of the biggest energy consumers in data centers. To conserve energy and reduce heat dissipation, we explore energy and thermal aware storage organizations and investigate cross-layer and cross-node, energy-efficient, thermally safe and performance-effective management schemes for data centers. Moreover, we revisit and redesign existing highly-performance-optimized control policies to be energy and thermal aware.