GDCSim - An Integrated Tool Chain for Analyzing Green Data Center Physical Design and Resource Management Techniques

Energy consumption in data centers can be reduced by efficient design of the data centers and efficient management of computing resources and cooling units. A major obstacle in the analysis of data centers is the lack of a holistic simulator, where the impact of a new computing resource (or cooling) management approach can be tested with different design (i.e., layout and configuration) of data centers (or vice versa). To fill this gap, this paper proposes Green Data Center Simulator (GDCSim) for analyzing data center energy efficiency by studying and testing: (i) different data center geometries, (ii) workload characteristics, (iii) platform power management schemes; (iv) scheduling algorithms; and (v) data center configurations. GDCSim is used to iteratively design green data centers. Further, it is validated against established CFD simulators. GDCSim is developed as a part of the BlueTool infrastructure project at Impact Lab. Keywords-Simulator; energy efficient; green, data center;