Thermal Time Shifting: Decreasing Data Center Cooling Costs with Phase-Change Materials

As data centers increase in size and computational capacity, their growth comes at a cost: an increasing thermal load that must be removed to prevent overheating. Here, the authors propose using phase-change materials (PCMs) to shape a data center's thermal load, absorbing and releasing heat when it's advantageous. They evaluate three important opportunities for cost savings. They find that in a data center, PCM can reduce the necessary cooling system size by up to 12 percent without impacting peak throughput, or increase the number of servers by up to 14.6 percent without increasing the cooling load. In a thermally constrained setting, PCM can increase peak throughput up to 69 percent while delaying the onset of thermal limits by over 3 hours, and a wax-aware scheduler enables up to a 11 percent reduction in peak cooling load when batch jobs are added, increasing average daily throughput by 36-52 percent.