The energy efficiency of Data Center (DC) operations heavily relies on a DC ambient temperature as well as its IT and cooling systems performance. A reliable and efficient cooling system is necessary to produce a persistent flow of cold air to cool servers that are subjected to constantly increasing computational load due to the advent of smart cloud-based applications. Consequently, the increased demand for computing power will inadvertently increase server waste heat creation in data centers. To improve a DC thermal profile which could undeniably influence energy efficiency and reliability of IT equipment, it is imperative to explore the thermal characteristics analysis of an IT room. This work encompasses the employment of an unsupervised machine learning technique for uncovering weaknesses of a DC cooling system based on real DC monitoring thermal data. The findings of the analysis result in the identification of areas for thermal management and cooling improvement that further feeds into DC recommendations. With the aim to identify overheated zones in a DC IT room and corresponding servers, we applied analyzed thermal characteristics of the IT room. Experimental dataset includes measurements of ambient air temperature in the hot aisle of the IT room in ENEA Portici research center hosting the CRESCO6 computing cluster. We use machine learning clustering techniques to identify overheated locations and categorize computing nodes based on surrounding air temperature ranges abstracted from the data. This work employs the principles and approaches replicable for the analysis of thermal characteristics of any DC, thereby fostering transferability. This paper demonstrates how best practices and guidelines could be applied for thermal analysis and profiling of a commercial DC based on real thermal monitoring data.
2 September 2022 in Expert Systems with Applications
There are all sort of indications that Internet usage will go only upwards, resulting in an increase in energy consumption and CO2 emissions. At the same time, a significant amount of this carbon footprint corresponds to the information and communication technologies (ICT) sector, with around one third being due to networking. In this paper we have approached the problem of green networking from the point of view of sustainability. Here, alongside energy-aware routing, we have also introduced pollution-aware routing with environmental metrics like carbon emission factor and non-renewable energy usage percentage. We have proposed an algorithm based on these three candidate-metrics. Our algorithm provides optimum data and control planes for three different metrics which regulate the usage of different routers and adapt the bandwidth of the links while giving the traffic demand requirements utmost priority. We have made a comparison between these three metrics in order to show their impact on greening routing. The results show that for a particular scenario, our pollution-aware routing algorithm can reduce 36% and 20% of CO2 emissions compared to shortest path first and energy-based solutions, respectively.
As low‐power wide‐area network (LPWAN) end devices (EDs) are deployed in massive scale, their economic and environmental costs of operation are becoming too significant to ignore and too difficult to...