Joint data center cooling and workload management: A thermal-aware approach

Information technology (IT) equipment and cooling infrastructure are key contributors to the total energy expenditure in a data center. There is typically significant power wastage due to inefficient cooling control and thermal-oblivious management of workload. Recent thermal-aware data center management techniques have not taken a unified approach in controlling IT and cooling systems. In this paper, we find that considering thermal effects of server workloads, in conjunction with control parameters of the cooling unit saves more power than optimizing each of them separately. We leverage a low complexity holistic data center model that considers thermal interactions between IT and cooling unit entities. This thermal model provides control decisions with fine-grained control variables. We propose joint cooling and workload management (JCWM), which has the potential to save a considerable amount of power by exploring synergies between the workload scheduler and operational parameters of the cooling unit. In addition, we provide a significant caveat for the power efficiency of server consolidation methods when taking into account associated thermal effects.