Advances on data center multilevel thermal performance assessment in AI era

Facing the high power and heat density of the AI requirement, this paper reviews recent advances in multi-level thermal performance assessment for data centers. This multi-level framework covering chip, device, rack/row, and room levels. Corresponding to the multi-level framework, a metric system micro-scale and macro-scale indicators is developed to improve system resilience, facility safety and overall energy efficiency. Further, this review summarize progress in data collection, including advanced sensor technologies, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and reduced-order models, such as AI/ML-based digital twins. Based on recent advances, future research directions are discussed in this paper, including standardization of multi-level metrics, high-accuracy data collection technologies, and utilization of AI/ML based technologies.