CoolEmAll announces simulation toolkit

CoolEmAll is announcing its final prototype software toolkit, and other resources, to help improve the efficiency and sustainability of data centres at Data Centre World (DCW), 26th and 27th February, Excel London.

CoolEmAll’s web-based, open source Simulation, Visualisation and Decision Support Toolkit (CoolEmAll SVD Toolkit) enables data centre designers, operators and technology suppliers to design and operate more energy-efficient facilities and equipment.

The toolkit does this by simulating the complex interactions between IT hardware, software (applications and workloads) and power/cooling systems within data centres. The final version of the toolkit will be officially released in March 2014.

As well as a stand (G07) at Data Centre World, two CoolEmAll representatives will be explaining the value of the tools in a session titled: Optimizing data centre energy efficiency using CoolEmAll simulation tools on Wednesday 26th February at 3pm to 3.30 pm including a Q&A. The session presenters are Ariel Oleksiak of Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Centre and Andrew Donoghue, European research manager, Datacenter Technologies, 451 Research.

“This final prototype is the culmination of nearly three years of R&D by computer scientists, data centre experts, energy researchers and industry. We have introduced new features that make it easier to model data centre operations and understand how to make facilities more efficient based on the applications and workloads they support,” said Andrew Donoghue, European research manager, 451 Research (part of the CoolEmAll consortium).
The integrated SVD Toolkit, available via a web-based interface, is capable of simulating new and existing facilities taking into account factors such as application profiles, hardware characteristics, management policies and heat transfer.

The majority of the SVD Toolkit is free to access (under open source licenses) and download from the CoolEmAll website.
The SVD Toolkit sub-tools are:
• ?SVD Modeller
o Enables the capture of application characteristics and the modelling of the impact that specific applications have on power usage of servers
o Used to build and verify hardware (servers) energy models
o Enables data centre models (from server components, to servers, to data centre halls) to be built and inserted into simulations.
• SVD Simulator
o Provides results on how specific management policies, hardware configurations, intensity of workloads or application types affect the overall energy consumption of a data centre
o Uses Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to simulate airflow and heat-transfer behaviour for various data centre configurations and environmental-conditions.
• ?SVD Analyser
o Responsible for the assessment of the energy-efficiency and heat-efficiency of the facility based on common metrics as well as novel ones proposed by CoolEmAll
o A web-based graphical user interface that includes 3D visualisation and detailed dashboards.