Fighting Fire with Fire: Modeling the Datacenter-Scale Effects of Targeted Superlattice Thermal Management
Local thermal hot-spots in microprocessors lead to worst case provisioning of global cooling resources, especially in large-scale systems. However, efficiency of cooling solutions degrade non-linearly with supply temperature, resulting in high power consumption and cost in cooling - 50 {approx} 100% of IT power. Recent advances in active cooling techniques have shown on-chip thermoelectric coolers (TECs) to be very efficient at selectively eliminating small hot-spots, where applying current to a superlattice film deposited between silicon and the heat spreader results in a Peltier effect that spreads the heat and lowers the temperature of the hot-spot significantly to improve chip reliability. In this paper, we propose that hot-spot mitigation using thermoelectric coolers can be used as a power management mechanism to allow global coolers to be provisioned for a better worst case temperature leading to substantial savings in cooling power. In order to quantify the potential power savings from using TECs in data center servers, we present a detailed power model that integrates on-chip dynamic and leakage power sources, heat diffusion through the entire chip, TEC and global cooler efficiencies, and all their mutual interactions. Our multiscale analysis shows that, for a typical data center, TECs allow global coolers to operate at higher temperatures without degrading chip lifetime, and thus save {approx}27% cooling power on average while providing the same processor reliability as a data center running at 288K.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-48
- OSTI ID:
- 1018774
- Report Number(s):
- LLNL-CONF-474345; TRN: US201114%%322
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Presented at: International Symposium on Computer Architecture, San Jose, CA, United States, Jun 04 - Jun 08, 2011
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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