Packing computing servers into the vessel of an underwater data center considering cooling efficiency

Zhi-Hua Hu, Yu-Xin Zheng and You-Gan Wang

Applied Energy, 2022, vol. 314, issue C, No S0306261922003956

Abstract: An Underwater Data Center (UDC) is an underwater vessel full of computing servers and designed with a cooling system using cold water in the ocean. A UDC vessel is composed of cabinets for computing servers, and the cabinets are finally packed into racks that facilitate the installments of the computing servers. We formulate the problem of packing cabinets into the vessel by considering the water volume required for server cooling and the placement of the cabinets of servers. Due to different patterns of racks, a set of mixed-integer linear programs were developed, and they were solved by methods with several stages. As demonstrated by experiments, the proposed models and strategies effectively solve the simulated instances generated by considering the cooling principles. The cabinets with more considerable differences in their width and height are better than single-sized cabinets because the smaller cabinets make the packing process more flexible. Moreover, multi-sized cabinet packing is significantly better than single-sized cabinet packing. Additionally, it is not always appropriate to use racks with large capacities. However, racks with multiple capacities may improve the space and energy utilization degrees when the size and the designed heat power consumption of the data center are fixed.

Keywords: Underwater data center; Packing optimization; Cooling system; Data centers; Mixed-integer linear program (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261922003956
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:appene:v:314:y:2022:i:c:s0306261922003956

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 405891/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2022.118986

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Energy is currently edited by J. Yan

More articles in Applied Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().