II-EN: BlueTool: Infrastructure for Innovative Cyberphysical Data Center Management Research

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Energy consumption for data centers (a.k.a. hosting centers, server farms, clusters etc.) is rapidly increasing and is fast becoming a significant portion of the nation?s annual energy budget. Surprisingly, many of the contemporary data centers are designed and managed very inefficiently, mainly due to reliance on folklore techniques rather than those grounded in hard scientific evidence. In addition, contemporary research and experimentation in greening data centers is severely hindered by the unavailability of an experimentation test-bed, the cost of performing live tests of alternative configurations and the excessive long duration for performing simulations based on high-complexity offline models based on computational fluid dynamics.The BlueTool project aims to resolve these issues by: 1) increasing awareness of the latest scientific and engineering research on managing data centers, and 2) providing a research and evaluation infrastructure to test and develop new methodologies to address the inefficiencies of data centers. BlueTool will promote the use of holistic cyber-physical concepts to foster the development of energy-efficient and sustainable data centers. It will leverage recent research advances in cooling technologies and cyber-physical management for data centers at Arizona State University (ASU) and provide synergy for advancing the ongoing research in this field at ASU and elsewhere. BlueTool will consist of: (a) an online tool that can simulate various configurations of data centers, in terms of physical layout, hardware and software configuration; (b) a research hub and portal, maintained by the IMPACT Lab at ASU (http://impact.asu.edu), that offers data services on various updatable archives including power and thermal profiles, multi-scale low-complexity thermal and power models, and data center management methods and software. Researchers from both academia and industry will be able to use BlueTool's online consulting services to improve the computing performance and energy consumption of conventional or existing configurations with newly developed techniques.