CoolEmAll - Optimising cooling efficiency in data centres

Abstract

The ICT sector is responsible for around 2 % of the global energy consumption, with data centres taking large fraction of this consumption. In many current data centres the actual IT equipment uses only half of the total energy while the remaining part is required for cooling and air movement. This results in poor cooling efficiency and energy efficiency, leading to significant CO2 emissions. EU project CoolEmAll investigates in a holistic approach how cooling, heat transfer, IT infrastructure, and application- workloads influence overall cooling and energy efficiency of data centres. In March 2013, CoolEmAll developed the 1st prototype of a Simulation, Visualisation and Decision support toolkit (SVD Toolkit), enabling assessment and user-driven optimisation of cooling efficiency in data centres by means of coupled workload- and thermal-airflow simulation. In this paper we describe architecture of the SVD Toolkit and present results enabling assessment and optimisation of cooling efficiency in data centres. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.