Monitoring and modelling open compute servers

Energy efficient control of server rooms in modern data centers can help reducing the energy usage of this fast growing industry. Efficient control, however, cannot be achieved without: i) continuously monitoring in real-time the behavior of the basic thermal nodes within these infrastructures, i.e., the servers; ii) analyzing the acquired data to model the thermal dynamics within the data center. Accurate data and accurate models are indeed instrumental for implementing efficient data centers cooling strategies. In this paper we focus on a class of Open Compute Servers, designed in an open-source fashion and currently deployed by Facebook. We thus propose a set of methods for collecting real-time data from these platforms and a control-oriented model describing the thermal dynamics of the CPUs and RAMs of these servers as a function of both manipulable and exogenous inputs (e.g., the CPU utilization levels and the air mass flow produced by the server's fans). We identify the parameters of this model from real data and make the results available to other researchers.