Phase II IUCRC University of Texas at Arlington: Center for Energy Smart Electronic Systems

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Data centers are an integral part of life, providing services ranging from social networking, e-commerce and entertainment to cloud infrastructures that provide storage and computing capabilities for individuals and enterprises. Data centers consume over 2% of the nation's electricity, generated mostly from fossil sources. The Center for Energy-Smart Electronic systems (ES2) was established to develop tools and methodologies for improving the energy efficiency of electronic systems, primarily data centers. Much of the energy expended by data centers is wasted due to operating inefficiencies, including operating more servers than are needed to handle the workload and overcooling the IT equipment, or deploying sub-optimal cooling and IT technologies. ES2?s research focusses on developing intelligent and fully automated techniques for operating data centers to match the IT and cooling resources to the workload demands, avoiding energy waste while maintaining service quality. ES2 research benefits society by: (a) providing solutions to reduce the demand on the electrical grid and the carbon footprint and enabling the growth of data center-based services in an energy-efficient way and (b) developing human resources by training engineers and computer scientists in high-demand skills. ES2?s research therefore enables the nation to maintain competitive, agile and energy-efficient cyber services and infrastructures. The goal of ES2 is to dramatically reduce data center energy consumption. The Phase I funding from NSF supported the development of models, metrics and infrastructures that would realize this vision. At University of Texas, Arlington (UTA), Phase II research focuses on improving energy efficiency at various scales of a data center facility and addressing the challenges involved in implementing alternative data center cooling technologies such as evaporative cooling and dielectric oil immersion cooling. UTA utilizes purpose-built data center research facilities and numerical analysis tools to evaluate and optimize the various cooling systems. At chip level, a dynamic water cooled cold plate developed in Phase I will be scaled to a chip scale package and integrated with robust flow control devices to enable uniform temperature distribution and realize reduction in pumping power. At the rack and room level, Phase II research focuses on developing deeper understanding in implementing evaporative cooling systems and address the corresponding particulate and gaseous contamination in data centers. Also, Phase II studies will focus on evaluating cooling performance, reliability and operability of systems implementing direct-to-chip liquid cooling and oil immersion cooling. In Phase I, UTA has graduated ten ES2-funded PhD students and over 60 students with master's degrees.