Making scheduling cool: temperature-aware workload placement in data centers

Trends towards consolidation and higher-density computing configurations make the problem of heat management one of the critical challenges in emerging data centers. Conventional approaches to addressing this problem have focused at the facilities level to develop new cooling technologies or optimize the delivery of cooling. In contrast to these approaches, our paper explores an alternate dimension to address this problem, namely a systems-level solution to control the heat generation through temperature-aware workload placement. We first examine a theoretic thermodynamic formulation that uses information about steady state hot spots and cold spots in the data center and develop real-world scheduling…