CFD Optimization of the cooling of Yosemite Open Compute Server
Abstract
Rising energy demands in data centers have constantly made thermal engineers
to think and come up with innovative cooling solutions in data centers. It is of utmost
importance to have control over the environmental impact of Data Centers. In 2011, the
Open Compute Project was started which aimed at sharing energy efficient practices for
data centers. The hardware and electrical specifications of the first open compute server –
Freedom was shared on open compute project’s website. It was a vanity free design and
its components were custom designed. It was deployed in one of the data centers in
Prineville, Oregon and within first few months of operation, considerable savings in every
and cost were observed. Since then, many open compute servers have been introduced
for applications like – compute, storage, etc. The open compute servers which were being
introduced mainly had a 2 socket architecture. Yosemite Open compute server was
introduced for serving heavy compute workloads. It provided significant improvement in
performance per watt as compared to previous generations open compute servers.
Yosemite Open Compute Server has a system on a chip architecture and has 4
CPU’s (1 CPU per sled). This study involves optimization of Yosemite Open Compute
server to improve its cooling performance using. CFD tools are very useful for thermal modeling of these servers and predict their efficiency. A commercially available CFD tool
has been used to do the thermal modeling of the server and its optimization has been done
to improve the cooling performance of the server. The model of the improved design has
been compared to the existing design to show the impact of air flow optimization on the
cooling performance of the server. The air flow characteristics and utilization of the fans
have been significantly improved in the improved design.