Cool job allocation: measuring the power savings of placing jobs at cooling-efficient locations in the data center

Abstract

Data center costs for computer power and cooling are staggering. Because certain physical locations inside the data center are more efficient to cool than others, this suggests that allocating heavy computational workloads onto those servers that are in more efficient places might bring substantial savings. This simple idea raises two critical research questions that we address: (1) How should one measure and rank the cooling efficiency of different places in a data center? (2) How substantial is the savings? We performed a set of experiments in a thermally isolated portion of a real data center, and validated that the potential savings is substantial and therefore warrants further work in this area to exploit the savings opportunity.