Project Overview
Power densities and
the implications of high operating temperatures on the
failure rates of components are key driving factors
of temperature-aware computing. Computer architects
and system software designers need to understand the
thermal consequences of their proposals, and develop
techniques to lower operating temperatures to reduce
both transient and permanent component failures. Until
recently, tools for understanding temperature ramifications
of designs have been mainly restricted to industry for
studying packaging and cooling mechanisms, with little
access to such toolsets for academic researchers. Developing
such tools is an arduous task since it usually requires
cross-cutting areas of expertise spanning architecture,
systems software, thermodynamics, and cooling systems.
Recognizing the need for such tools, there has been
recent work on modeling temperatures of processors at
the micro-architectural level which can be easily understood
and employed by computer architects for processor designs.
However, there is a dearth of such tools in the academic/research
community for undertaking architectural/systems studies
beyond a processor - a server box, rack or even a machine
room. ThermoStat is a detailed 3-dimensional Computational
Fluid Dynamics tool for thermal modelling of rack-mounted
server systems. Example usage of this tool can be found.
People
Jeonghwan Choi (Ph.D Student at KAIST)
Youngjae Kim (Ph.D Student)
Anand Sivasubramaniam (Prof. in Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering)
Jelena Srebric (Prof. in Dept. of Architectural Engineering)
Qian Wang (Prof. in Dept. of Mechanical Engineering)
Joonwon Lee (Prof. in Dept of Computer Science, KAIST)
Publications
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CFD-based Tool for Studying Temperature in Rack-mounted Servers
Jeonghwan Choi, Youngjae Kim, Anand Sivasubramaniam, Jelena Srebric, Qian Wang, and Joonwon Lee
IEEE Transactions on Computer (TC), IEEE Press, August 2008.
Paper
Modeling and Managing Thermal Profiles of Rack-mounted Servers with ThermoStat
Jeonghwan Choi, Youngjae Kim, Anand Sivasubramaniam, Jelena Srebric, Qian Wang, and Joonwon Lee
Proceedings of the International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture
(HPCA), February 2007. (28/174 = 16% accepted). Best student paper candidate.
Abstract
Paper
User Guidelines
ThermoStat is a thermal
modeling tool for rack-mounted servers. The ThermoStat
is based on CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) tools.
Most academic institutions have licenses for popularly
used CFD software such as FLUENT, FLOTHERM, Phoenics
etc. Currently ThermoState is built on Phoenics (which is one of various CFD tools).
ThermoStat provides useful tools for modeling and analyzing
thermal behavior of rack-mounted servers and individual
server.
How to create XML file for ThermoStat
In order to run ThermoStat,
you need to create XML file for ThermoStat. This document
contains information about how to write XML description
of server/rack-mounted system. We define templates for
the following components, such as rack, server, component,
fan, inlet, finlet, size, position).
Demo File
A short video file has
been prepared. It shows the users how to use ThermoStat
and helps them to use it with ease. The below hyperlink
will automatically play the video on your machine or
you can directly download to view it.
Download ThermoStat
The current release
version is version 0.9 because it need to be updated.
The officially complete version is expected soon. If
you would like to get the ThermoStat 0.9 Suit,
please send a request to jechoi.At.cse.psu.edu. We will email
you back a file named thermostat.tar.gz. Any
comment regarding ThermoStat is welcome.
Copyright (C) of Computer
Systems Laboratory, Department of Computer Science,
The Pennsylvania State University, 2007
