Data Center Construction Research Articles

Challenges in acoustical modeling of data centers

Data centers are physical infrastructures that house computing machines and related hardware equipment for data storage and processing. Due to the ever-increasing trend of cloud computing and the need for secure data storage, several organizations are involved in the development of large data center facilities. This new industry sector is seeing massive growth in recent years and municipalities and counties across the nation are welcoming the construction of data centers in their areas. Acoustical modeling for a data center can be challenging due to various factors and this article discusses a few such challenges that were experienced during the acoustical assessments of data center operations.

The Applications and Challenges of Nanofluids as Coolants in Data Centers: A Review

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, cloud computing and other technologies, data centers have become vital facilities. In the construction and operation of data centers, how to effectively solve the problem of cooling and energy saving is the key problem. In this review article, a critical review of recent research regarding the application of nanofluids in data center cooling are put forward. Many different aspects of nanofluids such as the classification of nanoparticles, base fluid components, and types and structures of heat exchangers were discussed. Furthermore, some advanced and up-to-date apparatus and theoretical models of utilizing nanofluids as coolants in data centers are reviewed and described in detail. Lastly, but not least, potential research directions in the future and the challenges faced by the researchers and industry in this field are proposed and discussed. In conclusion, nanofluids used as novel heat exchange medium, which has been widely proven in other areas, can also conspicuously improve data center cooling technology in the future.

Spatio-temporal data fusion techniques for modeling digital twin City

ABSTRACT The digital twin city technique maps the massive city environmental and social data on a three-dimensional virtual model. It presents the operational status of physical world and supports intelligent city governance. However, the inefficient utilization of distributed data resources, and the lack of sharing and collaboration among multiple departments restrict the data formulation of digital twin city construction. This research proposes a new cross-domain spatio-temporal data fusion framework for supporting complex urban governance. It integrates the heterogeneous urban information generated and stored by different government departments using multiple-information techniques. A specified geographic base reflecting the real city status is established, using geographical entities with unified address as identifiers to encapsulate the urban elements information. We introduce a comprehensive urban spatio-temporal data center construction process, which has already supported multiple urban governance projects. The two distinct advantages in using this data fusion system are: 1) The proposed Bert+PtrNet+ESIM-based address mapping method associates the urban elements information to their corresponding geographic entities with 99.3% F1-Score on real-world dataset. 2) The Wuhan spatio-temporal data center operation illustrates the capability of our framework for complex urban governance, which significantly improves the efficiency of urban management and services. This integrated system engineering provides reference and inspiration for further spatio-temporal data management, which contributes to the future social governance in digital twin city platform.

Migrating the state into corporate clouds

ABSTRACT This article examines the cloudification of the state by focusing on ‘Project Nimbus’ – a $1.2 billion tender offered by the Israeli government to move ‘the entire Israeli state’ into corporate clouds. As one of the biggest informational infrastructure projects Israel has known, Nimbus revolves around the construction or repurposing of six massive, resource-hungry corporate data centers and the ‘migration’ of the state into them. Accordingly, Nimbus potentially redraws the relationship between the state and big tech, as well as between the state and its citizens. Based on thematic analysis of various project-related sources, we highlight four main aspects of the ‘cloudification of the state.’ First, focusing on cloud ideology, we expose the neo-liberal logics behind the construction of the Nimbus data centers. Second, focusing on cloud epistemology, we show that the effort and organizational changes that come with the cloudification of the state translate into an acute dependence on the tech giants. Third, focusing on the DCaaSization of the state, we argue that with its reliance on DCaaS (‘data center as a service’), the state's ‘behind the scenes’ is fading into the tech giants’ backstage. Lastly, we argue that this cloudification translates into disseminating advanced AI-powered data processing tools alongside pronounced data-ist Silicon Valley ideologies. We conclude by arguing that the construction of the Nimbus data centers and the subsequent cloudification of the state enhance power and information asymmetries between the state and big tech and discuss the data-coloniality of this new cloudified power structure.

Smart life and sustainable development: a comparative analysis on energy and water efficiency in China and the EU

Smart life relies on huge volumes of data analysis, which makes data centers become important infrastructure in smart city areas. Nowadays, data centers are constructed in many countries and have become increasingly large electricity consumers. The consumption of electricity is caused not only by the servers of data centers but also by the cooling systems. Meanwhile, data centers also demand water - cooling methods, which result in water consumption. As for sustainable development, water and energy consumption are huge challenges. Laws and rules are necessary for utilizing efficiently relevant sources. This paper will analyze China and the European Union (EU) as two examples of jurisdictions to compare how the governments regulate the construction of data centers to implement the thrift of electricity and water. In China, provinces and cities established diverse regulations based on their different natural and climate conditions, thus there is not a uniform model for the implementation in the country. In the EU, the amendment of Energy Efficiency Directive seeks to establish common policies. The difference of rules in these two jurisdictions reflects that China and the EU have their own principles and objectives: China attempts to balance the demand of developing smart city infrastructures and the consumption on natural resources, but the EU has strong ambition on low carbon emission in the whole Union. However, the two jurisdictions still have a common goal to maximize the efficiency of water and electricity consumption which is a fundamental issue for accelerating the transition towards sustainability.

欧盟科学数据发展政策与规划

The continual advancement of global scientific and technological innovation capabilities has spurred a rapid growth of scientific data. As a global benchmark for scientific data management and sharing, the European Union (EU) constantly place a high priority on the management and development of scientific data, and has formed a comprehensive array of policies and plans to advance scientific data development. Through network investigation and literature analysis, this paper focuses on consolidating and summarizing the EUs scientific data support and regulatory bodies, management policies, development plans, and evaluates the effectiveness and challenges in data application practices. Moreover, it also outlines the issues confronting the development of scientific data in China and puts forward insightful recommendations. The analysis shows that the EU’s efforts to promote open science and open scientific data, the scientific data development policy system and sustainable development program are crucial to the open sharing, effective scientific management, maximizing benefits and sustainable development of scientific data in the EU, making the EU stand at the forefront of open scientific data and open science in the world. Furthermore, the ongoing integration of science data centers into the science and innovation infrastructure system of the EU. These practices of the EU can serve as valuable references for China in the development of scientific data, the construction of scientific data centers, the formulation of scientific data policies and development plans, and the play of scientific benefits.

Migrating the INFN-CNAF datacenter to the Bologna Tecnopolo: A status update

The INFN Tier1 data center is currently located in the premises of the Physics Department of the University of Bologna, where CNAF is also located. During 2023 it will be moved to the “Tecnopolo”, the new facility for research, innovation, and technological development in the same city area; the same location is also hosting Leonardo, the pre-exascale supercomputing machine managed by CINECA, co-financed as part of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, 4th ranked in the top500 November 2022 list. The construction of the new CNAF data center consists of two phases, corresponding to the computing requirements of LHC: Phase 1 involves an IT power of 3 MW, and Phase 2, starting from 2025, involves an IT power up to 10 MW. The new data center is designed to cope with the computing requirements of the data taking of the HL-LHC experiments, in the time spanning from 2026 to 2040 and will provide, at the same time, computing services for several other INFN experiments and projects, not only belonging to the HEP domain. The co-location with Leonardo opens wider possibilities to integrate HTC and HPC resources and the new CNAF data center will be tightly coupled with it, allowing access from a single entry point to resources located at CNAF and provided by the supercomputer. Data access from both infrastructures will be transparent to users. In this presentation we describe the new data center design, providing a status update on the migration, and we focus on the Leonardo integration showing the results of the preliminary tests to access it from the CNAF access points.

Africa’s roads to digital development: paving the way for Chinese structural power in the ICT sector?

Over the past few decades, China emerged as Africa’s main partner in digital development. Sino-African cooperation in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector meets African demand for advanced technologies and know-how while helping China to position itself in the global ICT sector. Albeit crucial for Africa’s digital development in the short term, this paper argues that the breadth of Sino-African cooperation carries important long-term consequences that could afford China latent control over Africa’s digital development. Drawing on Susan Strange’s pillars of structural power, this paper considers how the rollout of fiber-optic network cables underpins Chinese control over production, how the construction of data centers might impinge on security, and how research partnerships enhance norms and standards in future innovation—the knowledge pillar. The paper argues that the enabling force of Sino-African cooperation in these three realms is Chinese finance. To test this claim, I conduct a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) of 42 states in Sub-Saharan Africa, showing that Chinese aid and, to a lesser extent, Chinese loans are the main drivers of Sino-African ties in the ICT sector. The paper concludes that Chinese financial support not only promotes Africa’s digital development but also paves the way to Chinese structural power in the ICT sector.

How to build green substations? An LCA comparison of different sustainable design strategies for substations

The growing industry of Information and Communication technology necessitates an increase in the construction of data centers and substations that supply them with electricity at high voltage levels. The increase in the construction of data centers and therefore substations on the one hand, and their high energy consumption on the other hand, makes sustainable substation design of utmost importance to prevent environmental degradation. However, current studies often consider only the operation phase of the building and neglect other life cycle stages, resulting in biased decisions that shift the environmental problems from one stage to another that were not included in the scope of these studies. This paper investigates Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of a typical substation located in Germany, and applies three sustainable design strategies by creating scenarios, each varying in building material composition, waste heat utilization from data centers, and incorporation of green electricity from the grid. The environmental performance of these scenarios was evaluated using the One-Click LCA. Results indicate that switching to green electricity is the most impactful strategy that reduces the Global Warming Potential (GWP) to approximately 33 % compared to the base case. In the best solution which mixed all strategies, sharp reduction of GWP to 17.5 % was achieved. The highest impactful element of the building was its structure where the major building weight and a considerable amount of concrete cause the most GWP. Furthermore, the choice of materials is mainly important because of their embodied emissions, rather than their energetic values.

Financial Risk Prediction and Management of Enterprises Based on Financial Big Data

With the financial globalization, the data management mode of the financial industry has shifted from data sets to multi-service integration, and the construction of data centers in the financial industry has also been rapidly launched around the needs of business development. Therefore, financial enterprises need a lot of data analysis as the basis for decision-making. It is necessary to conduct more in-depth exploration and research on how to effectively integrate BD(big data) with diverse structures in the financial field, realize efficient data collection, and improve data processing efficiency. In the BD environment, how to use big financial BD technology to prevent financial risks in financial audit has become a widespread concern. This paper expounds the era of BD and its characteristics, and puts forward how to build a data platform for enterprise financial risk prediction and how to collect, manage and analyze data under the background of BD, in order to put forward feasible suggestions for financial audit on how to prevent financial risks under the background of BD.

Internet of things sports information collection and sports action simulation based on cloud computing data platform

In recent years, cloud computing technology has shown exponential growth, and the upgrading of hardware and the improvement of computing performance have brought significant changes to the Internet of Things industry. With the changes of the times and the emergence of many new demands, data platforms under cloud computing platforms must make corresponding changes according to the new demands. Among them, the construction of cross regional data centers is particularly important, especially in commercial environments. How to reduce the cost of data centers on cloud computing platforms while ensuring business quality has become a crucial issue. Based on the above situation, this article has optimized the bandwidth cost of the data center and solved the problem of big data transmission based on delayed big data windows and multi delay windows. A mathematical model for optimizing bandwidth cost under multi delay windows is proposed. This article also studied sports action simulation, which plays an important role in sports research, film animation, and virtual reality. Simulation actions are usually implemented based on data capture methods. However, these methods typically do not have interactivity with the environment. To enhance the authenticity and interactive ability of simulation action information collection, this article adopts reinforcement learning method for training and design, and applies a system of functions such as collecting human sports data processing. This article applies cloud computing data platforms and sports information collection to sports action simulation, making progress in the development of sports action simulation.

Server Hardware Market in Russia: Analysis of Competition before the Events of 2022

The server is the main element of the IT infrastructure of any enterprise. Currently, there is a growing demand for server equipment in the world due to the growth of innovations, the construction of data centers and an increase in data volume. The current geopolitical situation has significantly affected the Russian server market – almost all major international vendors have left the country or suspended their deliveries. This situation led to a shortage of server equipment in Russia, which was the impetus for the further development of domestic manufacturers. This article presents the results of the analysis of the server hardware market based on data collected by the IDC analytical company on the number of servers sold by each vendor from 2018 to 2020. As the main tool, the SV (strength/variety) matrix was used to assess the level of dominance in the industry, which is based on concentration indices, Linda and the modified Hall-Taidman coefficient. The analysis of individual quadrants of the SV matrix showed that the Russian server equipment market from 2018 and 2019 from the Red Ocean quadrant, which indicated that companies were fighting for market shares, moved to the B4 quadrant, that is, the industry became highly concentrated – a natural oligopoly was observed in the server equipment market. With the departure of foreign companies from 2022, the distribution of player shares will be significantly changed, which determines the interest of studying competition in the server equipment market in the future period.

Experimental and numerical investigation on thermal performance of data center via fan-wall free cooling technology

With the rapid increase in the scale of data center (DC) construction, DC air conditioning energy consumption has attracted wide attention over the past years. As the DCs are located in the mild climate regions, the air-side free cooling technology that combined with the fan wall air supply demonstrates excellent energy-saving potential. However, there are quite few reports on the environmental thermal response of air conditioning in fan-wall DCs. In this article, the effect of both supply air volume (SAV) and supply air temperature (SAT) on the temperature control performance of the DC are tested through a newly built small fan-wall DC facility. The effect of supply air parameters and the DC’s total power (DCTP) are further investigated through numerical simulation. The results show that the server inlet air temperature increases linearly with the SAT and the DCTP, whereas decreases logarithmically with the SAV. The optimal SAV is 0.5 m3/s for a single rack with 2.5 kW when the SAT is 27 °C. Based on the Rack Cooling Index (RCI) evaluation method, an empirical SAV correlation is established and verified against other numerical cases for fan-wall DCs when taking the SAV, the SAT, and the DCTP into account. In the current study, according to the developed model, approximately 34% energy consumption of fans could be saved for fan-wall DCs.

Simulation Test on Cooling and Fire Suppression with Liquid Nitrogen in Computer Room of Data Center

With the rapid development of worldwide computer data center construction, the reliability requirements of the fire-fighting system for data center rooms are also increasing. By using the self-designed simulation platform of liquid nitrogen spray, this paper studies the liquid nitrogen cooling process in the initial heating stage of a computer data center room fire and the liquid nitrogen extinguishing effects for common combustible materials, revealing the feasibility of applying liquid nitrogen to the fire extinguishing system for data center room. The results show that the cooling and inerting effects with quarter sector fan-shaped 6520 spray nozzle are the best among seven types of spray nozzles, the relative temperature changes by more than 50% within 5 min, and the oxygen concentration in the test space drops below 10%. Compared with optical fiber, the ignition range of uninterruptible power supply com-bination during combustion is relatively small. Liquid nitrogen has a significant fire-extinguishing effect on two combustible materials, which can successfully extinguish optical fiber and UPS within 3 min and 2 min, respectively.

Research on the Construction of Green and Low-Carbon Water Conservancy Data Center

In order to create a green and efficient data center and promote the technical level of green and low-carbon construction of data centers. This paper clarifies the necessity of building a green and low-carbon data center, and proposes construction methods suitable for data centers, which is in terms of architecture, electricity, power supply and distribution, air conditioning, and equipment configuration and layout.

Analysis on the Construction of Data Center of Large-scale Water Conservancy Project

This paper expounds the necessity of building data centers for large-scale water conservancy projects, which consists of data center site selection, transformation, modular cabinets, intelligent power supply, lithium battery packs and data center intelligent management platforms. It adopts new technologies and processes , new equipment, create an efficient and green data center, and provide solid computing power and data support for digital twin water conservancy projects.

Cloud service provisioning strategy using data center consortium clustering

The rapid growth of data centers provides cloud users with better choices and services. An increasing number of companies are involved in the construction of data centers; at the same time, the original cloud service providers are constantly expanding new data centers to meet the needs of users. Therefore, the joint scheduling of multiple data centers has become a difficult problem that cloud service providers must face. Joint scheduling refers to the resource allocation among multiple data centers of a cloud service provider. That is, how can the virtual machine application of cloud users be deployed on the physical machine in multiple data centers. A single data center provisioning strategy can solve the scheduling problem within the data center. However, multiple data centers can make the previous provisioning strategy invalid due to geographical location and other differences. In this paper, the characteristics of different data centers are analyzed and clustered to form a data center consortium. Then, the virtual machine (VM) is classified according to the deadline. As cloud users purchase virtual machine resources from cloud service providers, they are billed by time in most cases. The deadline of the virtual machine refers to the time when the virtual machine ends its service. Then, we analyze the power consumption of the data center and deploy VMs based on the rule of avoiding hotspot deployment of VMs with priority energy consumption. Finally, a cloud service provisioning strategy using data center consortium clustering (PSDC3) is proposed and verified. It can be seen from the results that the algorithm can significantly reduce the number of hotspots and energy consumption of cloud data centers.

Reliability Assessment of the Configuration of Dynamic Uninterruptible Power Sources: A Case of Data Centers

The number of data centers worldwide is increasing year by year, mostly because of the development of cloud services and applications. In the near future, the rate of construction of data centers will grow, with a corresponding increase in their electrical energy consumption. The requirements of the reliability of the electrical power supply of data centers are one of the highest among industrial power consumers, since uninterrupted power supply is critically important for the continuous functioning of server hardware. The assessment of electrical power supply reliability is one of the most important parts of the design process of data centers. However, the speed of the development of new power equipment does not always make it possible to use classical probabilistic and statistical methods for reliability assessment. Therefore, the development of new methods for reliability assessment based on alternative approaches, which can eliminate the disadvantages of probabilistic and statistical methods, are of great interest. This paper discusses the alternative method for analyzing the reliability of electrical power supply for the case of data centers. The method defines the reliability through the internal information of the system that characterizes the system’s topology, flows of information, energy, and matter in the system.

The Transformation of Enterprise Data and Business Under the Data Center Structure-Taking Kuaishou Group as an Example

The construction of data center plays a huge role in enterprise management and decision-making. The purpose of this paper is to study "the operation mode of the enterprise under the data middle-office architecture and the impact it serves on various businesses". Firstly, based on the discussion of the data, the concept of the data center is defined. Secondly, it discusses the structure of the data middle platform in the enterprise, and puts forward a theoretical model of its operation mode based on the discussion, and discusses the role of the data middle platform in the business. Finally, in the process of summarizing the defects and challenges faced by the middle and Taiwan, put forward development suggestions, which will help enterprises to improve the efficiency when building and using the middle platform. This research will help enterprises to further develop the value of middle and Taiwan, which is of great significance for the digital transformation of their own business and the maximization of efficiency.

A Proposal to Connect Large Data Centers and Associated Power Plants in the Power System

Construction of large Data Centers (DCs) facilities is usually accompanied by facilities for the production of electrical energy. It is necessary to connect these objects to the electric power system (PS) in order to provide DC power supply, and to distribute the produced electrical energy from power plants. For this purpose, it is necessary to plan the utilization of existing and build new substations (SS). Due to optimal exploitation of existing resources and planning of new ones, while preserving the stability of the PS, the connections are made in conveniently selected places. The proposal for the place and method of connecting DC to the specific PS is dealt with in the first part of the paper. Existing elements of the SS which are meant for this purpose and new elements that need to be implemented, as well as their position in the PS, are listed. The second part of the paper refers to the method of connecting sources of electrical energy, which are part of DC in a broader sense, to the PS. A overview of the limitations for existing SS resources capacity and a proposal for building new SS is given. When connecting any of the mentioned objects, it is necessary to take care to preserve redundant power supply of the DC. Information exchange between DC communication systems, electrical energy production facilities and the PS enables quick and efficient reaction to possible disturbances or complete malfunction of individual DC facilities in a broader sense, parts of the PS, or PS as a whole. The proposal for communication connection of DC and PS is processed in the third part of the paper. At the end of the paper, a general conclusion is presented on the way to realize DC connection in a broader sense, based on the concrete example of realization that was previously described.