Fine-grained Warm Water Cooling for Improving Datacenter Economy

Driven by the increasing power consumption of datacenters, the industry is focusing more on water cooling for improving the energy efficiency. Using warm water to cool servers has been considered as an efficient method to reduce the cooling energy. However, warm water cooling may lead to the risk of cooling failure and its energy efficiency suffers from the thermal imbalance among servers, due to the lack of fine-grained cooling control. In this paper, we propose a hybrid cooling architecture design that incorporates thermoelectric cooler into the water cooling system, to deal with cooling mismatching in a fine-grained manner. We exploit the warm water cooling strategy and design an adaptive cooling control framework according to workload variations, to make water cooling system more economical for datacenters. We evaluate the hybrid water cooling design based on a real hardware prototype and cluster traces from Google and Alibaba. Compared with conventional water cooling system, our hybrid water cooling system can reduce the energy consumption by 58.72%~78.43% to handle the cooling mismatching.