Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. has developed cooling control technology to make significant reductions to electricity usage by datacenter cooling equipment.

Datacenters increasingly host high-performance, high-temperature-generating computing systems, and it is expected that the energy consumption associated with these will rise continuously. The cooling equipment can account for up to 30-50% of total energy consumption in a datacenter. Currently, datacenters are mainly using air conditioning devices that bring in colder air from outside or control methods that search for optimal settings to minimize power consumption.

Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a new cooling control technology that can determine the rate at which outside air is introduced, factoring in both temperature and humidity, and can determine the optimal temperature settings by measuring the degree of impact each cooling device has on specific areas of the datacenter, significantly reducing the energy consumption needed for cooling.

Sensors are installed to measure temperature and humidity near the cooling equipment in the room, as well as outside. The system then calculates the amount of energy necessary to cool the room and remove humidity when recirculating internal air and when introducing outside air, based on the setting values for the cooling equipment. On top of this, Fujitsu Laboratories developed technology to control the ratio of internal air and outside air in order to minimize energy consumption. These systems are able to appropriately manage both temperature and humidity with low power consumption.

When changing the temperature settings for the equipment, this algorithm analyzes past changes in temperature distribution in the room, and calculates the impact of each cooling device on each area. By controlling the temperature setting of the cooling equipment, which has the biggest impact on an area when temperatures increase for servers in that area, this system can manage temperatures with minimal energy consumption.

When a trial of this newly developed air cooling control technology was conducted in a 300-rack Fujitsu datacenter during actual operations, it was able to reduce energy consumption needed for cooling by 29% compared to previous operating conditions . Based on these results, calculating the effects for a 1,000 rack datacenter that uses 70 million kWh/year for servers and 22 million kWh for cooling, energy savings of 6.4 million kWh/year can be expected.

Fujitsu Laboratories will be rolling out this newly developed cooling control technology to datacenters operated by Fujitsu Limited beginning in 2019, and simultaneously plans to incorporate the technology into a computing system.

Details of this technology were presented at the International Conference on Control, Automation, and Systems 2018 (ICCAS2018), an international conference being held in Pyeongchang, South Korea, on October 19.