Modeling and Identification of Data Center HVAC System with Super-Multipoint Temperature Sensing System

Abstract

This paper investigates a heating, ventilation, and airconditioning (HVAC) system in a data center equipped with a previously developed super-multipoint temperature sensing system. This system is expected to be a key technology for reducing the total power consumption of the HVAC system by controlling the inlet temperature distribution of the servers in real time. For this purpose, we present an overview of our fan-control system based on model predictive control. The main objective of this paper is to identify a dynamical model of temperature variations, in order to predict the future evolution of the distribution. However, the spatially high-density temperature data provided by the sensing system is not suited to the needed model accuracy, and the present modeling problem is differentiated from standard ones. We thus present a systematic scheme for the spatial density reduction of sensors by using spectral clustering and graph theory and associated techniques to acquire the dynamical model. Through simulation with real data, we finally show that the developed model achieves an accuracy of 0.58 degrees Celsius on average.