KAWASAKI, Japan : Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. has developed cooling control technology to make major reductions to electricity usage by datacenter cooling equipment. With the rapid spread of AI services, datacenters now increasingly host high-performance, high-temperature-generating computing systems, and it is expected that the energy consumption associated with these will rise continuously. Given this, new ways to reduce energy are in demand, particularly for cooling equipment, which can account for up to 30-50% of total energy consumption in a datacenter.

Currently, datacenters are adopting a variety of efforts to conserve energy used for cooling, including the air conditioning devices that bring in colder air from outside or control methods that search for optimal settings to minimize power consumption. Despite these efforts, further steps will be essential to effectively maximize power efficiency. Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a new cooling control technology that can determine the rate at which outside air is introduced, factoring in both temperature and humidity, and can determine the optimal temperature settings by measuring the degree of impact each cooling device has on specific areas of the datacenter, significantly reducing the energy consumption needed for cooling. Details of this technology will be presented at the International Conference on Control, Automation, and Systems 2018 (ICCAS2018), an international conference being held in Pyeongchang, South Korea, on October 19.

Development Background

AI and IoT markets are growing at a dramatic pace, and in line with this growth, large-scale computing systems so typical of datacenters are increasingly comprised of high performance, heat-generating devices that specialize in AI processing. Electricity used by datacenters amounts to about 2% of total global electricity consumption, and this figure is likely to grow. This not only promises to impact electricity costs, but also poses a serious burden for the global environment. The most effective way to reduce energy consumption in datacenters is to reduce the electricity usage of cooling equipment, which makes up about half of the datacenter’s total power usage.
Issues

Cooling devices that utilize natural energy in the form of outside air are used to reduce the amount of power needed to maintain datacenter temperatures at acceptable levels. By introducing outside air when it is cooler than the air in the datacenter, temperatures can be controlled with very little energy consumption. However, cooling devices also have humidity control requirements that occasionally conflict with the optimal conditions for temperature, so efficient control has not always been achieved when considering both factors-humidity, as well as temperature. Additionally, datacenter users execute a wide variety of services with different energy consumption, and so the amount of heat emitted by each server tends to change rapidly. In order to achieve further reductions in energy consumption, it is necessary to dynamically control setting values for each cooling device while both maintaining preset management requirements for environmental temperature and humidity for each server, and tracking changes in heat from server equipment.