ColdSpot: A thermal supervisor aimed at server rooms implementing a raised plenum cooling setup

• Published in: 2019 American Control Conference (ACC) pp. 1 - 8
• Main Authors: Lucchese, Riccardo, Johansson, Andreas
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: American Automatic Control Council 01.07.2019
• Subjects: Adaptation models; Atmospheric modeling; ColdSpot; Cooling; Data center thermal supervisor; Energy efficient cooling; Heating systems; Perforated tile flow model; Servers; Temperature measurement; Temperature sensors
• ISSN: 2378-5861
• DOI: 10.23919/ACC.2019.8814634

This work considers how to provision efficiently the cooling airflow in server rooms. We focus on raised plenum and perforated tiles setups and devise ColdSpot: an optimizing thermal supervisor that adaptively regulates the cooling airflow across the floor plane. ColdSpot operates by pairing 1) model-free estimators of the supply flow requirements at each perforated tile and 2) a model-based cost optimizer that actuates the room's Air Conditioning Units (ACUs) to satisfy the above rate requirements. We propose to use an array of Gaussian Processes (GPs) to capture the nonlinear flow model of each tile and present a hierarchical control structure on top of this modeling. We validate in silico the prediction accuracy of GPs in this context and demonstrate the performance of ColdSpot in regulating the cold-isles temperatures in spite of varying heat and airflow transport disturbances within the room.