Temperature management in data centers: why some (might) like it hot

The energy consumed by data centers is starting to make up a significant fraction of the world’s energy consumption and carbon emissions. A large fraction of the consumed energy is spent on data center cooling, which has motivated a large body of work on temperature management in data centers. Interestingly, a key aspect of temperature management has not been well understood: controlling the setpoint temperature at which to run a data center’s cooling system. Most data centers set their thermostat based on (conservative) suggestions by manufacturers, as there is limited understanding of how higher temperatures will affect the system. At the same time, studies suggest that increasing the temperature setpoint by just one degree could save 2–5% of the energy consumption. This paper provides a multi-faceted study of temperature management in data centers. We use a large collection of field data from different production environments to study the impact of temperature on hardware...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: Nosayba El-Sayed, Ioan A. Stefanovici, George Amvrosiadis, Andy A. Hwang, Bianca Schroeder
• Keywords: Computer Systems Organization, Hardware, Hardware Reliability, Memory Dram, SIGMETRICS 2012