Cyber-Physical Systems Technologies for Energy-Optimized Data Centers
Start date: October 1st, 2010 Expected completion date: 2013
PIs: Eduardo Tovar (ISEP/IPP) and Raj Rajkumar (CMU)
Dual Degree Ph.D. Students: Vikram Gupta (Electrical and Computer Engineering)
Teams: Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP/IPP), Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (FEUP), Research Center in Real-Time Computing Systems (CISTER), Carnegie Mellon University
Companies: PT Comunicações
url: http://www.cister.isep.ipp.pt/activities/SENODs/MainPage.ashx
Keywords: Cyber-Physical Systems; Sensor Networks; Green Technologies; Data Centers
Significant reduction in electricity and cooling cost at large data centers are targeted. If even 10% or more improvements in equipment density can be made safely, the construction of new data centers can be deferred. The lack of good energy models can lead to lower operating temperatures than specified. An integrated toolset that couples physical and cyber information will lead to significantly better thermal models. Precise knowledge of the difference between the actual power used and the power allocated can offer opportunities for increasing the density of equipment. This will yield additional energy- and cost-efficiencies. Dynamic layout optimization as the data center evolves will also make it more energy-efficient. Failures of physical subsystems that can endanger the health of the data center will be detected and notified. Our fine-grained sensing may also help to detect any minor problems before they become too large or very time-critical. Intrusions and associated ill-effects will be minimized. Accurate energy consumption reports can be provided to enterprise customers using the data centers. Simplified operations will also reduce operator errors. Finally, we expect that our technologies for making data centers energy-efficient will also be applicable to optimizing energy consumed by buildings. Buildings use up to 30% of all energy consumed in developed economies for lighting, heating, cooling and computing.
Articles about the project:
Researchers Develop Energy Efficiency System for Datacenters (April 2013)
