Neural Network-Based Prediction and Control of Air Flow in a Data Center

As modern data centers continue to grow in power, size, and numbers, there is an urgent need to reduce energy consumption by optimized cooling strategies. In this paper, we present a neural network-based prediction of air flow in a data center that is cooled through perforated floor tiles. With a significantly smaller execution time than computational fluid dynamics, it predicts in real-time server inlet temperatures and can detect whether prevalent air flow cools the servers sufficiently to guarantee safe operation. Combined with a cooling system model, we obtain a temperature and air flow control algorithm that is fast and accurate enough to find an optimal operating point of the data center cooling system in real-time. We also demonstrate the performance of our algorithm on a reference data center and show that energy consumption can be reduced by up to 30%.