TranSim: A Transient Thermal Simulation for Sustainable Data Centers in the Running Process

With the rise of computer-related fields, data centers have become essential infrastructure. Thermal analysis helps to improve data center performance and reduce data center energy consumption. Due to the variable load, the scheduling of the data center is frequent, and the thermal state also changes frequently. However, existing thermal analysis methods have a high cost regarding mesh division and thermal calculation and cannot provide dynamic thermal simulation for data centers. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a cost-compensated spatial–temporal meshing method for transient thermal simulation (TranSim) of the data center. TranSim adaptively adjusts the mesh boundaries according to the workload gradient of a location, and it can adaptively adjust the meshing step time according to the workload change frequency in order to achieve transient simulation. Cost-compensated thermal calculation replaces the CFD model, considering air flow, by adding the thermal source, thermal medium, thermal radiation and thermal lagging in order to gain a simple thermal calculation. This paper designs an experiment for comparing TranSim with several popular data center thermal simulation methods, such as a structured mesh with a CFD model, regarding their transient effect, time cost, and error cost. The results show that TranSim has a good transient effect, low error cost (the simulation error decreases by 13.5% compared with the average error) and low time cost (the simulation time is only about 7% that of the most accurate data center thermal simulation method).