Design of data centre rack arrangements using open source software

Author

Summers, J. ; Kapur, N. ; Thompson, H.

Author_Institution

Inst. of Eng. Thermofluids, Surfaces & Interfaces, Univ. of Leeds, Leeds, UK

fYear

2013

fDate

17-21 March 2013

Firstpage

45

Lastpage

51

Abstract

In the design of a data centre (DC), engineers are increasingly using specialized commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software packages to predict thermal loads for various cooling configurations. This paper is the first to demonstrate how a set of open source software tools, namely OpenFOAM, Octave and paraview can be used to simulate and visualize the airflow in a real live 55kW private DC, with a particular focus on energy savings and reduction of hotspots.

Keywords

air conditioning; computational fluid dynamics; computer centres; data visualisation; digital simulation; public domain software; Octave; OpenFOAM; airflow simulation; airflow visualization; computational fluid dynamics; cooling configuration; data centre design; data centre rack arrangement; energy savings; hotspot reduction; open source software tools; paraview; specialized commercial CFD software package; thermal load; Atmospheric modeling; Boundary conditions; Computational fluid dynamics; Data models; Mathematical model; Open source software; Servers; Data centre airflow; OpenFOAM; computational fluid dynamics; open source software;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Semiconductor Thermal Measurement and Management Symposium (SEMI-THERM), 2013 29th Annual IEEE

Conference_Location

San Jose, CA

ISSN

1065-2221

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-6427-0

Electronic_ISBN

1065-2221

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SEMI-THERM.2013.6526804

Filename

6526804