A Dynamic Thermal-Allocation Solution to the Complex Economic Benefit for a Data Center

Abstract

Data centers, which provide computing services and gain profits, are indispensable to every city in the information era. They offer computation and storage while consuming energy and generate thermal discharges. To maximize the economic benefit, the existing research studies on the data center workload management mostly leverage the dynamical power model, i.e., the power-aware workload allocation. Nevertheless, we argue that for the complex relationship between the economic benefit and so many attributes, such as computation, energy consumption, thermal distribution, cooling, and equipment life, the thermal distribution dominates the others. Thus, thermal-aware workload allocation is more efficient. From the perspective of economic benefits, we propose a mathematical model for thermal distribution of a data center and study which workload distribution could determinately change the thermal distribution in the dynamic data center runtime, so as to reduce the cost and improve the economic benefits under the guarantee of service provisioning. By solving the thermal environment evaluation indexes, RHI (Return Heat Index) and RTI (Return Temperature Index), as well as heat dissipation models, we define quantitative models for the economic analysis such as energy consumption model for the busy servers and cooling, energy price model, and the profit model of data centers. Numerical simulation results validate our propositions and show that the average temperature of the data center reaches the best values, and the local hot spots are avoided effectively in various situations. As a conclusion, our studies contribute to the thermal management of the dynamic data center runtime for better economic benefits.