Thermal-Aware Scheduling in Green Data Centers

Data centers can go green by saving electricity in two major areas: computing and cooling. Servers in data centers require a constant supply of cold air from on-site cooling mechanisms for reliability. An increased computational load makes servers dissipate more power as heat and eventually amplifies the cooling load. In thermal-aware scheduling, computations are scheduled with the objective of reducing the data-center-wide thermal gradient, hotspots, and cooling magnitude. Complemented by heat modeling and thermal-aware monitoring and profiling, this scheduling is energy efficient and economical. A survey is presented henceforth of thermal-ware scheduling and associated techniques for green data centers.