Towards thermal aware workload scheduling in a data center

High density blade servers are a popular technology for data centers, however, the heat dissipation density of data centers increases exponentially. There is strong evidence to support that high temperatures of such data centers will lead to higher hardware failure rates and thus an increase in maintenance costs. Improperly designed or operated data centers may either suffer from overheated servers and potential system failures, or from overcooled systems, causing extraneous utilities cost. Minimizing the cost of operation (utilities, maintenance, device upgrade and replacement) of data centers is one of the key issues involved with both optimizing computing resources and maximizing business outcome. This paper proposes an analytical model, which describes data center resources with heat transfer properties and workloads with thermal features. Then a thermal aware task scheduling algorithm is presented which aims to reduce power consumption and temperatures in a data center. A simulation study is carried out to evaluate the performance of the algorithm. Simulation results show that our algorithm can significantly reduce temperatures in data centers by introducing endurable decline in performance.