Open Access

ARTICLE

THERMAL MANAGEMENT OF DATA CENTERS UNDER STEADY AND TRANSIENT CONDITIONS

by

a Mechanical Engineering Department, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA
b Department of Mechanical Engineering, Western New England University, Springfield, MA 01119, USA

* Corresponding Author: Email:

Frontiers in Heat and Mass Transfer 2020, 15, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.5098/hmt.15.12

Abstract

Data centers are of crucial importance today in the storage and retrieval of large amounts of data. Most organizations and firms, ranging from banks and online retailers to government departments and internet companies, use data centers to store information that can be recovered efficiently and rapidly. As the deployment of data centers has increased, along with their capacity for data storage, the demands on thermal management have also increased. It is necessary to remove the energy dissipated by the electronic circuitry since the temperature of the components must not rise beyond acceptable levels that could damage them or affect their performance. The energy required for the cooling of data centers is generally quite substantial, with typical data centers requiring hundreds for megawatts for heat removal. Therefore, it is important to develop efficient thermal management systems to reduce power consumption and minimize the environmental impact. Extensive work has been done in recent years on the cooling of data centers. Though most studies have focused on steady state processes, time-dependent behavior is also of considerable interest because the thermal load is generally not constant but varies with time. Fluctuations in the load may arise or the load may peak at certain times. Efficient time-dependent distribution of load between various data centers, if several data centers are available to a given organization, or between different servers of a given data center may be used to improve the efficiency of the heat removal process and thus reduce the overall power consumption. Since environmental conditions vary from location to location, appropriate data centers may be selected, from those available, in order to use the most favorable location to reduce the overall cooling load. These aspects demand a study of both the steady and time-dependent behavior of data centers. The results obtained may be used to optimize the thermal management system and reduce the overall energy consumption. This paper reviews some of the relevant work done on data center cooling, with particular attention given to load distribution and to the data center location that determines the local environmental conditions. These results could form the basis for optimizing the cooling strategy for a system of data centers.

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