Weatherman: Automated, Online and Predictive Thermal Mapping and Management for Data Centers

— Recent advances have demonstrated the potential benefits of coordinated management of thermal load in data centers, including reduced cooling costs and improved resistance to cooling system failures. A key unresolved obstacle to the practical implementation of thermal load management is the ability to predict the effects of workload distribution and cooling configurations on temperatures within a data center enclosure. The interactions between workload, cooling, and temperature are dependent on complex factors that are unique to each data center, including physical room layout, hardware power consumption, and cooling capacity; this dictates an approach that formulates management policies for each data center based on these properties. We propose and evaluate a simple, flexible method to infer a detailed model of thermal behavior within a data center from a stream of instrumentation data. This data — taken during normal data center operation — includes continuous readings tak...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ICAC
• Authors: Justin D. Moore, Jeffrey S. Chase, Parthasarathy Ranganathan
• Keywords: Autonomic Computing, Data Center, ICAC 2006, Thermal Load, Workload Distribution