Publication

Power Breakdowns and PUE Implications of Air-Cooled and Direct-Liquid-Cooled Servers

2026

Abstract

Power usage effectiveness (PUE) has guided years of datacenter energy efficiency improvements, but only differentiating between facility and IT power obscures insights into how IT power is used within the servers and may misdirect optimizations. In this work, we measure air-cooled and direct liquid-cooled (DLC) servers and break down their power into power supply (PSU) loss, fan, idle, and compute power via power distribution unit (PDU)-level measurements. We apply our insights to show how high ambient temperature operation affects server power profiles and distorts PUE: increasing fan power improves PUE even though energy efficiency may decrease, while transitioning to DLC can worsen PUE despite reducing total datacenter energy consumption.

Official source

https://infoscience.epfl.ch/entities/publication/a6ecc5e5-dff7-4de3-97f5-aa7c3c1dcbf0

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2026

Abstract

Official source

https://infoscience.epfl.ch/entities/publication/a6ecc5e5-dff7-4de3-97f5-aa7c3c1dcbf0

About this result

Related concepts (32)

Computer cooling

Computer cooling is required to remove the waste heat produced by computer components, to keep components within permissible operating temperature limits. Components that are susceptible to temporary malfunction or permanent failure if overheated include integrated circuits such as central processing units (CPUs), chipsets, graphics cards, and hard disk drives. Components are often designed to generate as little heat as possible, and computers and operating systems may be designed to reduce power consumption and consequent heating according to workload, but more heat may still be produced than can be removed without attention to cooling.

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An evaporative cooler (also known as evaporative air conditioner, swamp cooler, swamp box, desert cooler and wet air cooler) is a device that cools air through the evaporation of water. Evaporative cooling differs from other air conditioning systems, which use vapor-compression or absorption refrigeration cycles. Evaporative cooling exploits the fact that water will absorb a relatively large amount of heat in order to evaporate (that is, it has a large enthalpy of vaporization).

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A cooling tower is a device that rejects waste heat to the atmosphere through the cooling of a coolant stream, usually a water stream, to a lower temperature. Cooling towers may either use the evaporation of water to remove process heat and cool the working fluid to near the wet-bulb air temperature or, in the case of dry cooling towers, rely solely on air to cool the working fluid to near the dry-bulb air temperature using radiators.

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Power Breakdowns and PUE Implications of Air-Cooled and Direct-Liquid-Cooled Servers

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