A project called CoolEmAll has revealed prototype tools to aid the design of energy-efficient data centers. The European Commission-funded scheme wants data center designers and operators to test these tools ahead of a full release next year.
CoolEmAll hopes to come up with a simulation, visualization and decision support (SVD) toolkit, which could be used to simulate data centers while taking various factors into account. These include the types of applications that are being run, different hardware configurations, the intensity of workloads and specific management policies, as well as airflow. This would be represented through dashboards and 3D visualizations.
The project, which got funding as part of the Commission’s high-performance computing (HPC) drive, also aims to create a set of hardware and thermodynamic models that can be plugged into these simulations. These so-called Data Center Efficiency Building Blocks (DEBBs) will be made available in an open repository.
The analyst house 451 Research is taking part in the project. According to 451 analyst Andrew Donoghue:
“Factors such as rising fuel prices, stricter environmental legislation and constrained credit amid the financial crisis are contributing to higher capital and operational costs for data centre owners and operators. The tools and research that will result from the CoolEmAll project will help the data centre industry to meet some of these challenges, and develop more efficient and sustainable facilities.”
The prototype tools can be downloaded now. CoolEmAll is looking for people to test them, and also to potentially work with the consortium if they have something to offer.
In the meantime, here’s a video demonstrating the user interface for CoolEmAll’s under-construction Module Operation Platform:
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