Efficient energy utilization based on task distribution and cooling airflow management in a data center

Abstract

With the recent emergence of smartphones, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT), our society has become more dependent on the Internet. In these circumstances, increasing energy consumption in data centers is becoming a crucial problem worldwide and data center managers are required to run them efficiently in terms of energy consumption. This study aims to reduce cooling airflow energy by achieving appropriate task distribution and adding a shutter control system, which reduces the energy consumption of an air-conditioner. In most cases, servers tend to be unnecessarily cooled at low temperatures, even when their exhaust temperatures are not high. Our proposed method solves this problem by using shutter control and introducing a task allocation method. We built an experimental rack model and implemented our proposed control system, validating it with a real HTTP data request. The results show that our experimental system reduces the cooling airflow energy by 4.4%.