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Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are physical and engineered systems whose operations are monitored, coordinated, controlled and integrated by a computing and communication core. Data centers with their voracious appetite for power and cooling are an embodiment of cyber-physical systems that require ambient intelligence. Energy-efficient operations and the integrated management of cyber- and physical aspects of data centers are the central focus of this proposed effort.

Challenges faced by Data Centers

Data centers increasingly constitute a critical backbone of the worldwide IT infrastructure, serving as the server infrastructure for search engines, mail servers, e-commerce, data warehousing and other cloud computing functions. IBM, for example, operates more than 400 data centers across the world occupying more than 7 million square feet 1. While such data centers generally target large-scale virtual IT services, the design, construction and operation of data centers (a) depend on cyber-physical infrastructure with major power and cooling requirements, (b) incur significant energy costs, and (c) can lead to significant economic and societal impact from the failures of physical subsystems. In fact, power and cooling in a data center cost more than the information technology (IT) equipment supported 5. As a result, data centers face an emerging crisis. The challenges faced by these data centers include:

Sustainability: Datacenters in the US currently consume 2% of all electricity with an annual growth of 15% which is unsustainable.
Cooling Management: Excessive cooling wastes substantial costs in cooling, while inadequate cooling can lead to hardware errors that can render the performance of a data center to become unacceptably low.
Heterogeneity: Every data center is different and hence has its own unique needs. So, any solution must be easily adaptable.
Dynamism: Data centers change over time as (a) old servers are retired and new servers, racks and cabinets are added, (b) old cooling equipment is replaced and new cooling equipment is added, (c) denser storage subsystems are added.
Operational Complexity: Data centers continue to scale in size and complexity making operational simplicity a critical requirement to avoid operator errors.

This project aims at tackling some of these challenges to to enable Sustainable ENergy-Optimized Datacenters (SENODs).