Keynote speech

To meet the ever growing demands of Internet and cloud services, the data center industry is experiencing rapid expansion. Data centers consume billions of KWh electricity every year, and each can take hundreds of million dollars to build. Most data centers are conservatively provisioned and operated to achieve high reliability, resulting in wasted resources and high cost. In this talk, we take a cyber-physical system view of sensing and control data centers and discuss opportunities and our experiences. We have designed and deployed wireless environmental sensors to monitor heat distribution in server rooms and software-based services to estimate server power consumption. We build models that bridge the cyber dynamics of computing and physical dynamics of the facility. The findings are used to advance the way equipment are provisioned, loads are distributed, and systems are operated. Finally, I will discuss a few challenges for scaling into the future, with alternative energy sources and alternative data center architecture.