iTad: An I/O-Aware Thermal Model for Data Centers

Abstract

With the ever-growing cooling costs of large-scale data centers, thermal management must be adequately addressed. Thermal models can play a critical role in thermal management that helps in reducing cooling costs in data centers. However, existing thermal models for data centers can overload I/O activities. To address this issue, we developed an I/O-aware thermal model called iTad for data centers. The iTad model captures the thermal characteristics of servers in a data center, oering a much ner granularity than the existing models. In addition to CPU workloads, iTad incorporates the I/O load in order to accurately estimate the thermal footprint of the servers with I/O-intensive activities. We validate the accuracy of the iTad model using real-world temperature measurements acquired by an infrared thermometer. Our empirical results show that I/O utilizations have a significant impact on internal temperatures of data servers. We show that thermal management mechanisms can quickly retrieve the thermal information of servers from iTad before making important workload placement decisions in a real-time manner. ii