Fujitsu Laboratories has developed cooling control technology to make major reductions to electricity usage by data centre cooling equipment.
With the rapid spread of AI services, data centres now increasingly host high-performance, high-temperature-generating computing systems, and it is expected that the energy consumption associated with these will rise continuously. Given this, new ways to reduce energy are in demand, particularly for cooling equipment, which can account for up to 30-50% of total energy consumption in a data centre.
Currently, data centres are adopting a variety of efforts to conserve energy used for cooling, including the air conditioning devices that bring in colder air from outside or control methods that search for optimal settings to minimize power consumption. Despite these efforts, further steps will be essential to effectively maximise power efficiency.
Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a new cooling control technology that can determine the rate at which outside air is introduced, factoring in both temperature and humidity, and can determine the optimal temperature settings by measuring the degree of impact each cooling device has on specific areas of the data centre, significantly reducing the energy consumption needed for cooling.
Fujitsu Laboratories has developed algorithms for controlling the intake of outside air to minimise power consumption of cooling equipment, and for efficiently cooling by dynamically identifying heat producing areas.
By combining this newly developed system with technology previously developed by Fujitsu Laboratories that predicts temperature changes in data centres with high accuracy, it is possible to, for example, forecast conditions an hour into the future, and control operations so as to effectively minimize power consumption over time.
Sensors are installed to measure temperature and humidity near the cooling equipment in the room, as well as outside. The system then calculates the amount of energy necessary to cool the room and remove humidity when recirculating internal air and when introducing outside air, based on the setting values for the cooling equipment.
On top of this, Fujitsu Laboratories developed technology to control the ratio of internal air and outside air in order to minimise energy consumption. These systems are able to appropriately manage both temperature and humidity with low power consumption.
When changing the temperature settings for the equipment, this algorithm analyses past changes in temperature distribution in the room, and calculates the impact of each cooling device on each area. By controlling the temperature setting of the cooling equipment, which has the biggest impact on an area when temperatures increase for servers in that area, this system can manage temperatures with minimal energy consumption.
When a trial of the newly-edeveloped air cooling control technology was conducted in a 300-rack Fujitsu data centre during actual operations, it was able to reduce energy consumption needed for cooling by 29% compared to previous operating conditions.
Based on these results, calculating the effects for a 1 000-rack data centre that uses 70 million kWh/year for servers and 22-million kWh for cooling, energy savings of 6,4-million kWh/year can be expected.