Fujitsu Develops Cooling Control Technology To Reduce Data Center Energy Consumption
Cooling system energy consumption cut 29% by calculating appropriate combination of internal air circulation and intake of outside air.
Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. has developed cooling control technology to make major reductions to electricity usage by data center cooling equipment. With the rapid spread of AI services, data centers 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% to 50% of total energy consumption in a data center.
Currently, data centers 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 maximize 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 center, significantly reducing the energy consumption needed for cooling. Details of this technology will be presented at the International Conference on Control, Automation, and Systems 2018 (ICCAS2018), an international conference being held in Pyeongchang, South Korea, on October 19.