Energy reduction in server cooling via real time thermal control

Currently, server fans often over-cool the CPUs, contributing to increased use of energy. A thermal model-based real-time fan controller was studied in this paper to reduce the energy consumption in server CPU fans. A reduced order model of the server CPU and its heatsink was developed using proper orthogonal decomposition (POD), which provided 180 times faster simulation times, with reasonable accuracy. This was used in conjunction with a fan control strategy to achieve 27% savings in energy consumed for cooling.