Balance of Power: Dynamic Thermal Management for Internet Data Centers

The advent of Internet-based applications and their resulting multitier distributed architecture has changed the focus of design for large-scale Internet computing. Internet server applications execute in a horizontally scalable topology across hundreds or thousands of commodity servers in an Internet data center. Increasing scale and power density have a significant impact on the data center's thermal properties. Effective thermal management is essential to the robustness of mission-critical applications. Internet service architectures can address multisystem resource management and thermal management at the granularity of data centers. This article presents a framework for thermal-load balancing by applying load monitoring and dynamic workload placement to manage the thermal distribution within a data center. The results demonstrate that dynamic thermal management based on asymmetric workload placement can promote uniform temperature distribution that reduces local hot spots, quickly responds to thermal emergencies, reduces energy consumption costs, reduces initial cooling system capital costs and improves equipment reliability.