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Cooling data centers efficiently

Data centers account for approximately 2% of total U.S. electricity consumption, and cooling them can account for 40% of a data center’s overall energy usage. Now, an engineering professor at UTA is developing new hybrid technology to make the cooling process more energy-efficient.

Dereje Agonafer, Presidential Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, received a $2.84 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s COOLERCHIPS (Cooling Operations Optimized for Leaps in Energy, Reliability, and Carbon Hyperefficiency for Information Processing Systems) Program for the research.

One of the goals of the project, he says, is to exceed COOLERCHIPS’ targets for information technology load at data centers, resulting in cooling technology that will have extendibility for future generations of servers.

“The proposed hybrid cooling can save technology companies that employ the servers a massive amount of money in energy costs,” Dr. Agonafer continues. “In turn, that reduction in operating costs could be passed along to the consumer.”

Co-principal investigators are Damena Agonafer (University of Maryland), Nenad Miljkovic (University of Illinois), and Sumanta Acharya (Illinois Institute of Technology).