PES Day ''21 Panel Session: Experiences and Learned Lessons from an Air Free-Cooled Tropical Data Center Testbed (Slides)

The air free-cooling has been long thought infeasible in tropics due to the unique challenges of year-round high ambient temperature and relative humidity. In recent years, the increasing availability of servers that can tolerate higher temperatures and relative humidity levels sheds light upon the feasibility of the air free-cooling to enhance the data center energy efficiency. However, building an air free-cooled data center in the tropics requires extensive experiments to understand the details of how the realistic tropical environment conditions will affect data center power consumption, computing throughput, and server hardware reliability. This presentation will talk about the key observations, experiences and learned lessons from the experiment that was conducted. The experiments show that (1) the air free-cooling design that uses fans only can reduce the power usage effectiveness (PUE) by 38%, compared to the global average PUE, (2) the tropics’ year-round high temperatures up to 37 degree Celsius do not impede the air free-cooling, and (3) the implementation of the air free-cooled data centers in tropics requires special cares to deal with airborne contaminants to avoid fast corrosion rate and dust-induced server faults. Presentation will also highlight the energy resilience of Singapore and its carbon footprint.