PhD Forum Abstract: Knowledge From Noise: EMI-Guided Power Monitoring

Server-level power monitoring is essential for efficient data center management. However, high expense of individual power meter for each server has hindered widespread adoption, resulting in a concentration on UPS and cluster-level monitoring in most data centers. We introduce an innovative and cost-effective power monitoring method, which utilizes a single sensor to derive power consumption data from all servers by tapping into the conducted electromagnetic interference (EMI) emitted by server power supplies. This enables the measurement of power consumption through non-invasive single-point voltage measurements. Our approach, tested with a set of ten servers from two different brands, can estimate individual server power with less than ∼7% mean absolute error.