A smart coordinated temperature feedback controller for energy-efficient data centers

Energy cost plays a big role in the running cost of data centers and cutting it would get great economic and green benefits. This paper presents a coordinated MPC-based (Model Predictive Control) scheduling strategy called Co-ThermoRing to smartly reduce energy cost in data centers. Co-ThermoRing makes use of an online hierarchical feedback control mechanism which is composed by a global cluster-level temperature controller and many local node-level efficiency controllers. The inlet temperatures of all nodes can be kept balanced to minimize the heat recirculation by the temperature controller, and DVFS (Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling) technology is adopted by each efficiency controller to utilize every computing node intelligently. This method can also contain temperature and utilization fluctuations with little performance degradation. With a TPC-W (Transaction Processing Performance Benchmark (TM) W) run in a real data center to simulate an online bookstore behavior our method is proved to have less energy consumption in normal cases and emergency cases compared with existing solutions such as LRHex, C-Oracle-F and ThermoRing. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.