Real-Time 3D Visualization of Temperature Distribution for Data Center Thermal Management

Abstract

Heat management has become one of the most critical challenges to the rapid development of data centers. To address this issue, a 3D visualization technique is proposed in this paper to analyze and manage temperature distribution in data center rooms. At first, a room is divided into uniform grids and the temperature field is established by calculating temperature values for each cell using an inverse transfer distance weighted interpolation (ITDWI) algorithm with sensor data. Then, it visualizes these cells by voxel rendering. To improve performance, weights are pre-computed to accelerate interpolation. And two different rendering strategies are adopted to better understand temperature distribution. Our approach is deployed in an actual data center room in Chinese Academy of Sciences. By experiments, it can visualize the temperature field of the data center in real time, and the visualization results help to locate the hot spots conveniently and give a comprehensive view for thermal management.