Datacenter cooling strategies

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Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are focusing on improving datacenter cooling

Joshi and his students have assembled a small high-power-density datacenter on the Georgia Tech campus that includes different types of cooling systems, partitions to change room volumes and both real and simulated server racks. They use fog generators and lasers to visualize air flow patterns, infrared sensors to quantify heat, airflow sensors to measure the output of fans and other systems, and sophisticated thermometers to measure temperatures on server motherboards.

Beyond studying the effects of alternate airflow patterns, they are also verifying that cooling systems are doing what they’re supposed to do. Because tasks are dynamically assigned to specific machines, heat generation varies in a datacenter. Joshi’s group is also exploring algorithms that could help even out the computing load by assigning new computationally-intensive tasks to cooler machines, avoiding hot spots.

Fog machines. Cool. More in the full PR at HPCwire.

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Comments

  1. This sounds all very technical, but also very interesting, that is one thing that machines do not like and that is heat as they do over heat and slow down at times especially if on has one room filled with servers and its enclosed. It will be interesting to hear how this all works out, but good luck to them with their experiment.