Lifecycle-Based Data Center Design

Environmental sustainability is an increasingly important design constraint for next-generation servers and datacenters. Unlike prior studies that focus on operational energy use, we study the environmental impact of current designs across the entire lifecycle, including embedded impact factors related to material use and manufacturing. Based on the insights provided by this study, we propose a solution co-designed across system architecture and physical packaging, including (1) material-efficient physical organization, (2) environmentally-efficient cooling infrastructures, and (3) effective design of system architectures to reuse components — all working together to improve sustainability. We provide a detailed evaluation of our proposed solution in terms of sustainability, thermal manageability, and computational performance. Our results show that the proposed approach is effective in addressing the (often non-intuitive) tradeoffs between performance and different components of sustainability.