Energy-efficient Computing and Data Centers

Data centers consume roughly 1% of the total electricity demand, while ICT as a whole consumes around 10%. Demand is growing exponentially and, left unchecked, will grow to an estimated increase of 20% or more by 2030.

This book covers the energy consumption and minimization of the different data center components when running real workloads, taking into account the types of instructions executed by the servers. It presents the different air- and liquid-cooled technologies for servers and data centers with some real examples, including waste heat reuse through adsorption chillers, as well as the hardware and software used to measure, model and control energy. It computes and compares the Power Usage Effectiveness and the Total Cost of Ownership of new and existing data centers with different cooling designs, including free cooling and waste heat reuse leading to the Energy Reuse Effectiveness. The book concludes by demonstrating how a well-designed data center reusing waste heat to produce chilled water can reduce energy consumption by roughly 50%, and how renewable energy can be used to create net-zero energy data centers.

Luigi Brochard was a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, then at Lenovo Data Center Group where he designed energy aware software systems. He is now a consultant on energy efficiency.

Vinod Kamath worked with IBMx86 as a thermal engineer and is now a Senior Technical Staff Member with the Lenovo Data Center Group, where he is responsible for the water-cooled server design.

Julita Corbalán is Associate Professor at the UPB, associate researcher at BSC-CNS and technical leader for the EAR Lenovo-BSC project.

Scott Holland is a thermal engineer with Lenovo Data Center Group and is responsible for providing direct liquid-cooling solutions. His most recent project was the Lenovo ThinkSystem SD650.

Walter Mittelbach has been working on adsorption chillers at Fraunhofer ISE since 1995. He also founded two companies: Fahrenheit GmbH (2002) and Sorption Technologies GmbH (2018).

Michael Ott is a senior researcher in the HPC division at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, where he leads the research activities on energy efficiency.

Introduction ix

Chapter 1. Systems in Data Centers 1

1.1. Servers 1

1.2. Storage arrays 3

1.3. Data center networking 4

1.4. Components 5

1.4.1. Central processing unit 5

1.4.2. Graphics processing unit 7

1.4.3. Volatile memory 8

1.4.4. Non-volatile memory 10

1.4.5. Non-volatile storage 10

1.4.6. Spinning disks and tape storage 13

1.4.7. Motherboard 15

1.4.8. PCIe I/O cards 16

1.4.9. Power supplies 17

1.4.10. Fans 18

Chapter 2. Cooling Servers 19

2.1. Evolution of cooling for mainframe, midrange and distributed computers from the 1960s to 1990s 19

2.2. Emergence of cooling for scale out computers from 1990s to 2010s 20

2.3. Chassis and rack cooling methods 23

2.4. Metrics considered for cooling 27

2.4.1. Efficiency 27

2.4.2. Reliability cost 28

2.4.3. Thermal performance 29

2.5. Material used for cooling 31

2.6. System layout and cooling air flow optimization 32

Chapter 3. Cooling the Data Center 37

3.1. System cooling technologies used 37

3.2. Air-cooled data center 38

3.2.1. Conventional air-cooled data center 38

3.3. ASHRAE data center cooling standards 40

3.3.1. Operation and temperature classes 40

3.3.2. Liquid cooling classes 41

3.3.3. Server and rack power trend 42

3.4. Liquid-cooled racks 43

3.5. Liquid-cooled servers 46

3.5.1. Water heat capacity 46

3.5.2. Thermal conduction module 47

3.5.3. Full node heat removal with cold plates 48

3.5.4. Modular heat removal with cold plates 50

3.5.5. Immersion cooling 50

3.5.6. Recent DWC servers 51

3.6. Free cooling 54

3.7. Waste heat reuse 54

3.7.1. Reusing heat as heat 54

3.7.2. Transforming heat with adsorption chillers 55

Chapter 4. Power Consumption of Servers and Workloads 65

4.1. Trends in power consumption for processors 65

4.1.1. Moore’s and Dennard’s laws 68

4.1.2. Floating point instructions on Xeon processors 72

4.1.3. CPU frequency of instructions on Intel Xeon processors 73

4.2. Trends in power consumption for GPUs 74

4.2.1. Moore’s and Dennard’s laws 77

4.3. ACPI states 78

4.4. The power equation 83

Chapter 5. Power and Performance of Workloads 87

5.1. Power and performance of workloads 87

5.1.1. SKU power and performance variations 87

5.1.2. System parameters 89

5.1.3. Workloads used 92

5.1.4. CPU-bound and memory-bound workloads 92

5.1.5. DC node power versus components power 93

5.2. Power, thermal and performance on air-cooled servers with Intel Xeon 94

5.2.1. Frequency, power and performance of simple SIMD instructions 95

5.2.2. Power, thermal and performance behavior of HPL 98

5.2.3. Power, thermal and performance behavior of STREAM 103

5.2.4. Power, thermal and performance behavior of real workloads 107

5.2.5. Power, thermal and frequency differences between CPUs 115

5.3. Power, thermal and performance on water-cooled servers with Intel Xeon 124

5.3.1. Impact on CPU temperature 124

5.3.2. Impact on voltage and frequency 125

5.3.3. Impact on power consumption and performance 127

5.4. Conclusions on the impact of cooling on power and performance 131

Chapter 6. Monitoring and Controlling Power and Performance of Servers and Data Centers 133

6.1. Monitoring power and performance of servers 133

6.1.1. Sensors and APIs for power and thermal monitoring on servers 134

6.1.2. Monitoring performance on servers 140

6.2. Modeling power and performance of servers 142

6.2.1. Cycle-accurate performance models 142

6.2.2. Descriptive models 142

6.2.3. Predictive models 144

6.3. Software to optimize power and energy of servers 149

6.3.1. LoadLeveler job scheduler with energy aware feature 150

6.3.2. Energy Aware Runtime (EAR) 151

6.3.3. Other run time systems to manage power 153

6.4. Monitoring, controlling and optimizing the data center 154

6.4.1. Monitoring the data center 154

6.4.2. Integration of the data center infrastructure with the IT devices 156

Chapter 7. PUE, ERE and TCO of Various Cooling Solutions 159

7.1. Power usage effectiveness, energy reuse effectiveness and total cost of ownership 159

7.1.1. Power usage effectiveness and energy reuse effectiveness 159

7.1.2. PUE and free cooling 162

7.1.3. ERE and waste heat reuse 163

7.2. Examples of data centers PUE and EREs 164

7.2.1. NREL Research Support Facility, CO 164

7.2.2. Leibnitz Supercomputing data center in Germany 166

7.3. Impact of cooling on TCO with no waste heat reuse 173

7.3.1. Impact of electricity price on TCO 177

7.3.2. Impact of node power on TCO 178

7.3.3. Impact of free cooling on TCO 181

7.4. Emerging technologies and their impact on TCO 183

7.4.1. Waste heat reuse 184

7.4.2. Renewable electricity generation 189

7.4.3. Storing excess energy for later reuse 192

7.4.4. Toward a net-zero energy data center 193

Conclusion 195

References 199

Index 209

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