CoolIT: Coordinating Facility and IT Management for Efficient Datacenters

The expanding computational needs of today’s businesses and organizations have led to a significant increase in the number and size of datacenter facilities. While technological advances in cooling solutions and server densities are enabling the performance levels required by applications, the energy costs of these computational and heat management solutions may soon outpace the capital expense of purchasing them. To address the associated issues of cost, scalability, and sustainability, prior work has created management solutions that enable efficient operating conditions, including techniques for power aware workload management in the IT space, and at the facility level, new cooling and thermal management methods. This paper articulates the opportunities derived from the ability to coordinate across these two management domains, by describing CoolIT, an ongoing collaborative effort between Computer Science (CERCS) and Mechanical Engineering (CEETHERM) researchers to improve overall datacenter efficiency.