Opportunities and Challenges in the Thermal Management of Modern Data Centers

Special Issue Editorial Board

Srikanth Rangarajan                    [email protected]

Bharath Ramakrishnan                 [email protected]

Mohammad I Tradat                     [email protected]

Dear Colleagues,

Data centers house different mission-critical electronic equipment, which is typically organized in racks to process and store data. Modern data centers equipped for data storage, high-performance computing, telecommunication, and video streaming services consume a tremendous amount of electricity for safe, secure, and reliable operations. Global data center electricity usage has increased from approximately 152 billion kW h/year in 2005 to 238 billion kW h/year in 2010 (roughly 1.3% of global electricity use). In a typical data center, about one-third of the total electricity is allocated to the thermal management of electronics. Thus, thermal management is a growing concern for commercial and public sector data center organizations. With the miniaturization of microelectronic components and with a tendency towards growing component density, air cooling becomes less energy efficient and often demands bigger heat sinks with bigger fans at the chassis level. Consequently, substantial efforts and progress have been made to research and develop advanced forced air cooling methods and alternative liquid cooling solutions such as cold plates in an attempt to mitigate rack level heat greater than 25kW. Several scholarly works, both experimental and numerical, have been published in recent years dealing with thermal management challenges within modern data center racks.

This Special Issue aims to quantitatively examine and compare the performance of traditional and state of the art cooling technologies with potential application in the thermal management of data centers. Technologies could include forced air cooling, free cooling, evaporative cooling, single and two-phase indirect liquid cooling, immersion cooling, spray cooling, heat pipes, jet impingement, or embedded cooling. The influence of various technologies on the reliability of server electronics and their impact on the total energy consumption in data centers based on the geometric location, data center size, and type are expected to be addressed.

Researchers and individual contributors are cordially invited to publish their findings in this Special Issue of "Opportunities and Challenges in the Thermal Management of Modern Data Centers".

Prof. Dr. Bahgat G Sammakia
Dr. Scott N Schiffres
Guest Editors

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• data center
• thermal management
• high-density racks
• high-performance racks
• forced-air cooling
• warm-water cooling
• single-phase cooling
• two-phase cooling
• microchannel cooling
• embedded cooling
• immersion cooling
• free cooling
• evaporative cooling.