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This article develops the notion of a thermopolitics of data to describe an ongoing infrastructural integration of the platform economy with energy politics through the mediation of heat. Building on fieldwork conducted at a data centre owned by a major Russian digital platform that, since 2016, has been the main source of heating for the Finnish town of Mäntsälä, the article analyzes the ways in which the materialities of heat and data get mobilized by different actors to produce a new object—the data centre as a thermal urban infrastructure. Situating these processes in a history of shifting scientific and popular understandings of future fuels, and of the relation between information and energy, the article extends emergent scholarly literature on the cultures of thermal manipulation that underpin digital media. An enquiry into the thermopolitics of data illuminates the ways in which bodies and spaces are silently integrated and infrastructurally organized to simultaneously function as objects of quantification, commodification and differentiation, and the provisioning of thermal regulation and human care for these practices. In the formation of these relations, new regulatory, ethical and epistemological questions about the relationship between data, agency and energy arise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the nuclear analysis of the European DEMO baseline 2015 with HCLL blanket carried out with the TRIPOLI-4 ® Monte Carlo code and the JEFF-3.2 nuclear data library. The TRIPOLI-4 ® model was imported from CAD using the McCad tool. A procedure that generates the detailed 3D model describing all the HCLL blanket internal structures was developed. This procedure allows parametrization of the blanket internal structures such as the number of cooling plates, manifolds, etc. and the thickness of the stiffening grid for instance. Different design variants were studied to improve the tritium production. From this previous study a complete nuclear analysis was carried out on a promising design which is a compromise between tritium production and mechanical robustness. All criteria (TBR, nuclear heating in coils and displacement damage in vacuum vessel) are met using this new reference design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Big data applications have become increasingly popular with the appearance of cloud computing and green computing. Therefore, internet service providers (ISPs) need to build data centers for data storage and data processing under the cloud service pattern. However, data centers often consume a significant amount of energy and lead to pollutant emissions. In recent years, the high energy consumption and environmental pollution of data centers have become a pressing issue. This paper reviews the progress of energy-saving technologies in high-performance computing, energy conservation technologies for computer rooms and renewable energy applications during the construction and operation of data centers. From multiple perspectives of energy consumption, cost reduction, and environment protection, a comprehensive set of strategies are proposed to maximize data centers’ efficiency and minimize the environmental impact. This paper also provides energy-saving trends for data centers in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To advance datacenter capabilities beyond what commodity server designs can provide, the authors designed and built a composable, reconfigurable fabric to accelerate large-scale software services. Each instantiation of the fabric consists of a 6 x 8 2D torus of high-end field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) embedded into a half-rack of 48 servers. The authors deployed the reconfigurable fabric in a bed of 1,632 servers and FPGAs in a production datacenter and successfully used it to accelerate the ranking portion of the Bing Web search engine by nearly a factor of two. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We consider the problem of optimal control of a multi-server queue with controllable arrival and service rates. This study is motivated by its potential application to the design and control of data centers. The cost structure includes customer holding cost which is a non-decreasing convex function of the number of customers in the system, server operating cost which is a non-decreasing convex function of the chosen service rate, and system operating reward which is a non-decreasing concave function of the chosen arrival rate. We formulate the problem as a continuous-time Markov decision process and derive structural properties of the optimal control policies under both discounted cost and average cost criterions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Cooling is an important issue in data centre design and operation. Accurate evaluation of a design or operational parameter choice for cooling is difficult as it requires several runs of computationally intensive computational fluid dynamics (CFD) based models. Therefore there is need for an exploration method that does not incur enormous computation. In addition, the exploration should also provide insights that enable informed decision making. Given these twin goals of reduced computation and improved insights, we present a novel approach to data centre cooling exploration. The key idea is to do a local search around the current design or operation of a data centre to obtain better design or operation parameters subject to the desired constraints. To do this, all the microscopic information about airflow and temperature in data centre available from a single run of CFD computation is converted into macroscopic metrics called influence indices. The influence indices, which characterize the causal relationship between heat sources and sinks, are used to refine the design or operation of the data centre either manually or programmatically. New designs are evaluated with further CFD runs to compute new influence indices and the process is repeated to yield improved design or operation as per the computation budget available. We have carried out guided explorations of design and then operation of a realistic data centre using this methodology. Specifically, we considered maximization of the heat load (design parameter) and supply temperatures of CRAC (operating parameter) in the data centre subject to the constraints that: (1) servers are kept at appropriate temperatures and (2) overloading of CRACs is avoided. Our evaluation for a 1500sq.ft. data centre shows that the use of influence indices cuts down the exploration time for design by 80% as compared to unguided explorations. It is demonstrated quantitatively that this solution is close to optimal. A guideline was evolved to reduce the effect of initial configuration on the final solution. Proposed methodology provides an additional 10% reduction in operational cost over existing methods of unguided explorations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The funder Jisc supported 27 british universities to establish or improve their research data manangement (RDM) services in 2011-2013. The comprehensive materials and tools by the Digital Curation Center (DDC), which handle the entire life cycle of the data, offered orientation. The structure of this article also follows this cycle to describe the state-of-the-art RDM as it was realized by six Jisc projects that will be focussed on. The aim of this analysis was to elicit from these examples which tasks are undertaken by libraries. Primarily, this are the overall management of RDM Services and the implementation of training. Repositories and metadata are also mostly curated here, while these tasks are often located at the IT services, as well as the project management and requirements analysis. The policy development is one more important task of the library, frequently held in cooperation with the research services, which are almost always in charge of data management planning (DMP). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data centers are facilities that primarily contain electronic equipment used for data processing, data storage, and communications networking. Regardless of their use and configuration, most data centers are more energy intensive than other buildings. The continuous operation of information technology equipment and power delivery systems generates a significant amount of heat that must be removed from the data center for the electronic equipment to operate properly. Since data centers spend up to half their energy on cooling, cooling systems becomes a key factor for energy consumption reduction strategies and alternatives in the data centers. This paper presents a theoretical analysis of an absorption chiller driven by solar thermal energy as cooling plant alternative for data centers. Source primary energy consumption is used to compare the performance of different solar cooling plants with a standard cooling plant. The solar cooling plants correspond to different combinations of solar collector arrays and thermal storage tank, with a boiler as source of energy to ensure continuous operation of the absorption chiller. The standard cooling plant uses an electric chiller. Results suggest that the solar cooling plant with flat-plate solar collectors is a better option over the solar cooling plant with evacuated-tube solar collectors. However, although solar cooling plants can decrease the primary energy consumption when compared with the standard cooling plant, the net present value of the cost to install and operate the solar cooling plants are higher than the one for the standard cooling plant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System (GIS) has been rebuilt around a single central table holding all statistics in one column, currently containing 14,541,491 data values. This architecture enables extremely flexible data handling, but requires that the context of each data value be captured entirely as metadata. Statistical reporting areas are defined via an ontology of administrative units, in which hierarchical relationships are compulsory while boundary polygons are optional. What a number measures is recorded via a relational implementation of the Data Documentation Initiative standard, locating each value within an n-dimensional matrix, or nCube, whose dimensions are variables such as age, gender, and occupation. The data library can be extended to additional countries or more statistical topics without adding any database tables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the architecture and the implementation of BlueStar, which uses a federation-based approach to design and build Internet-scale data centers. Instead of aggregating all of the compute, storage, and network resources in a single data center, our approach uses the concept of a federation in which different-size data centers participate to provide the capacity needed to support Internet-scale applications. The main advantage of our approach is that due to the inherent geographic distribution of the data centers, applications can be easily provided with support for high availability, disaster recovery, and localized access (reduced latency). The approach also enables the service providers to realize benefits by deciding to locate the hosting of applications to take advantage of savings due to cost differentials between peak and offpeak hours, power rates, and cooling costs across data centers. Further, the approach enables individual data centers to maintain independence and operational control over their resources. We discuss the implementation of BlueStar using two sample composite applications: BlueMaps, a server-side mashup application (i.e., an application that provides data or functionality from more than one location), and Lotust Connections, a collaboration application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the role of computers in the consumption of energy that contributes to the global load of pollution. Estimates regarding the level of energy consumption by server farms and data centers in the U.S. are analysed in terms of their contribution to global warming. Issues relating to the environmental impact of computer parts and peripherals are also noted. The development of Energy Star regulations for servers developed in the U.S. is discussed. Research by the television program "60 Minutes" into pollution resulting from the disposal of electronic products is also addressed.