Energy-Efficient Server Rack Cooling using Feedforward Control: Benefits and Problems

Burkhard Hensel and Klaus Kabitzsch

Keywords

Cooling, Optimization, Data Center

Abstract

In modern data centers cooling consumes a significant part of the totally used energy. In this paper a feed forward control strategy is presented which reduces variations of temperature inside the racks by making use of the measurable load of the server processors and room temperature. By doing this, the mean temperature (temperature set point) can be raised, what results in lower costs for cooling the data center. Advantages and problems of this approach are discussed,where the main focus lies on the demands of modern data centers and high performance computing racks.Feed forward control allows in the example application energy savings of 59% in comparison to no control and 5%in comparison to conventional feedback control.

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