With exponentially increasing power densities due to technology scaling and ever increasing demand for performance, chip temperature has become an important issue that limits the performance of computer systems. Typically, it is essential to use a set of on-chip thermal sensors to monitor temperatures during the runtime. The runtime thermal measurements are then employed by dynamic thermal management techniques to manage chip performance appropriately. In this paper, we propose an inverse distance weighting method based on a dynamic Voronoi diagram for the reconstruction of full thermal characterization of integrated circuits with non-uniform thermal sensor placements. Firstly we utilize the proposed method to transform the non-uniformly spaced samples to virtual uniformly spaced data. Then we apply three classical interpolation algorithms to reconstruct the full thermal signals in the uniformly spaced samples mode. To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we develop an experiment for reconstructing full thermal status of a 16-core processor. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms spectral analysis techniques, and can obtain full thermal characterization with an average absolute error of 1.72% using 9 thermal sensors per core.

The effects of air-intake format of forced-air-cooled equipment on the efficiency of air conditioning systems are studied. A modern data center features a large number of information-processing devices to provide telecommunication services. These devices generate considerable heat, and the equipment that houses these devices often employs "forced air cooling" in which a cooling effect is achieved by sucking in large amounts of room air. An air conditioning system used for a machine room filled with such equipment therefore requires high fan driving power resulting in significantly low air conditioning efficiency. In this study, we first performed mockup-based experiments to obtain a quantitative understanding of how different air-intake formats for equipment affect the temperature at various room locations such as equipment intake. We then created a model for predicting the temperature at various locations, and on the basis of this model, we analyzed the factors affecting intake temperature and examined how intake temperature affects air conditioning efficiency. It was found that placing air inlets in the lower 1/3 portion of forced-air-cooled equipment could prevent the equipment from reabsorbing the hot air that it blows out and therefore improve air conditioning efficiency.

A high-efficiency air cooling system is one of the keys to achieving high throughput in an ATM switching system for Broadband ISDN. Our approach is to cool the multichip modules plugged into a planar packaging system by using a two-phase thermosyphon cold-plate with an air-cooled condenser. Physically separating the cold-plate and the air-cooled condenser and connecting item by small diameter pipes is the key to applying this cooling technology to large planar packaging systems to increase volumetric packaging densities. Furthermore, thermosyphon technology allows the heat transfer process to operate without any external pumping power. Therefore this cooling system is regarded an extended high-performance air cooling system. The optimum structure was investigated while focusing on ways to reduce the external thermal resistance. The external thermal resistance between the system's cold-plate and air inlet was measured to be 0.21 K/W at an air velocity of 2 m/s and a cooling duty of 150 watts. Using this external thermal resistance value, we simulated the cooling characteristics of an MCM containing a 44 array of 10-mm-square LSI chips on an alumina substrate measuring 100100 mm. For an allowable temperature rise of 60, simulated thermal resistance was 6 K/W at an air flow of 2 m/s. This allows a power dissipation of more than 160 watts per MCM and a heat flux of 1.6 W/cm2. This system will extend the applicability of air cooling to power levels generally considered to lie in the domain of liquid cooling, and thus to the ATM switching nodes for B-ISDN.