Abstract—This paper presents data centers from a cyberphysical system (CPS) perspective. Current methods for controlling information technology (IT) and cooling technology (CT) in data centers are classified according to the degree to which they take into account both cyber and physical considerations. To evaluate the potential impact of coordinated CPS strategies at the data-center level, we introduce a control-oriented model that represents the data center as two coupled networks: a computational network representing the cyber dynamics and a thermal network representing the physical dynamics. These networks are coupled through the influence of the IT on both networks: servers affect both the quality of service (QoS) delivered by the computational network and the generation of heat in the thermal network. Using this model, three control strategies are evaluated with respect to their energy efficiency and computational performance: a baseline strategy that ignores CPS considerations, an uncoordinated strategy that manages the IT and CT independently, and a coordinated strategy that manages the IT and CT together to achieve optimal performance with respect to both QoS and energy efficiency. Simulation results show that the benefits to be realized from coordinating the control of IT and CT depend on the distribution and heterogeneity of the computational and cooling resources throughout the data center. A new cyber-physical index (CPI) is introduced as a measure of this combined distribution of cyber and physical effects in a given data center. We illustrate how the CPI indicates the potential impact of using coordinated CPS control strategies.

Energy efficiency in data center operation depends on many factors, including power distribution, thermal load and consequent cooling costs, and IT management in terms of how and where IT load is placed and moved under changing request loads. Current methods provided by vendors consolidate IT loads onto the smallest number of machines needed to meet application requirements. This paper’s goal is to gain further improvements in energy efficiency by also making such methods ’spatially aware’, so that load is placed onto machines in ways that respect the efficiency of both cooling and power usage, across and within racks. To help implement spatially aware load placement, we propose a model-based reinforcement learning method to learn and then predict the thermal distribution of different placements for incoming workloads. The method is trained