Cooling as You Wish: Component-Level Cooling for Heterogeneous Edge Datacenters

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Authors: Fangming Liu, Qiangyu Pei, Shutong Chen, Yongjie Yuan, Qixia Zhang, Xinhui Zhu, Ziyang Jia, Fei Xu, Dong Zhang, Bingheng Yan
Cited by: 0
References: 31

Abstract

As computing shifts toward the edge, edge datacenters are becoming essential for supporting diverse real-time applications. Unlike traditional cloud datacenters, edge datacenters face unique cooling challenges due to their requirements forproximity to end users, high density, and hardware heterogeneity. While warm water cooling is a promising technique for this infrastructure, current one-size-fits-all cooling strategies significantly compromise efficiency due to severe inter- and intra-component hotspots. In this work, we present CoolEdge+, a cost-effective component–level water cooling system for enhancing the cooling efficiency of edge datacenters. Specifically, CoolEdge+dynamically adjusts the inlet water temperature for each component through a carefully designed water circulation architecture to mitigate inter-component hotspots. To address intra-component hotspots, it employs vapor chamber–based cold plates that rapidly dissipate heat without manual intervention or additional energy consumption. We further design a fine-grained cooling control framework that leverages a well-managed power capping approach to decide on customized inlet water temperatures and hardware power limits. Based on a hardware prototype and a real-world trace from Alibaba PAI, evaluation results show that CoolEdge+reduces cooling energy consumption by up to 27.19% compared to existing coarse-grained systems, while maintaining performance guarantees. Compared to the state-of-the-art CoolEdge, CoolEdge+saves 35.24% more cooling costs with comparable energy consumption and no latency violations.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Energy Efficiency in Computing Cloud Computing and Resource Management Heat Transfer and Optimization

Publication details

Journal / source
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Volume
75
Issue
4
Pages
1518–1532
Publication date
14 January 2026