Title
Energy neutral hybrid cooling system for high performance processors
Abstract
We present the design and testing of a hybrid energy neutral cooling system for data centers' CPUs. The system operates as a passive heat-sink at normal operating conditions, and can provide active cooling when a boost in performance is required (i.e., overclocking) at zero cost by exploiting thermoelectric generators (TEGs) to harvest the energy from the CPU heat dissipation. Server rooms have plenty of wasted heat that can be used to drive low power subsystems that work in symbiosis with servers. Our prototype has been tested on ARM based CPUs, the future core of low power data centers. We firstly evaluated the most suited TEG to supply the conditioning circuit which drives the fan. Then, we defined a governor that allows the active cooling to be exploited when overclocking is necessary and that provides several thermal management policies. Finally we built the proposed system to evaluate the real performance. Experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness in passive and active cooling achieving up to 13 minutes overclocking by recovering the dissipated heat.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/IGCC.2014.7039181
Green Computing Conference
Keywords
Field
DocType
computer centres,heat sinks,microprocessor chips,performance evaluation,power aware computing,thermoelectric cooling,waste heat,ARM based CPU,CPU heat dissipation,TEG,active cooling,conditioning circuit,data center CPU,energy harvesting,energy neutral hybrid cooling system,high performance processors,low power data centers,low power subsystems,passive heat-sink,server rooms,thermal management policies,thermoelectric generators
Automotive engineering,Overclocking,Central processing unit,Thermoelectric generator,Server,Active cooling,Computer cooling,Water cooling,Engineering,Server room,Embedded system
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.35
4
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Luca Rizzon1324.78
Maurizio Rossi2419.87
Roberto Passerone385571.43
Davide Brunelli4103893.98