Towards greening a campus grid: Free cooling during unsociable hours

Free cooling has become widely used in the area of computer room thermal control, especially where the temperature constraint can be relaxed. However, in tropical regions, such as Malaysia, free cooling cannot be applied all of the time. This paper presents a strategy for grids that allows jobs to be executed on resources that are free cooled. The paper describes how a recommended period of time for using free cooled resources is predicted. The period is predicted from a historical analysis by using machine learning. Experiments on a classroom used for campus grid computing showed that, typically, free cooled resources can be used for 5 hours per day, when the temperature is less than 28 degrees Celsius. The result is of use to those developing campus grids in tropical countries.