Autonomous Monitoring of Data Center Operations

When: Friday, July 12, 2019
Where: PGH 563
Time: 11:00 AM

Speaker: Dr. Rong Zheng, McMaster University, Canada

Host: Dr. Jaspal Subhlok, University of Houston

Today’s data centers (DCs) consume up to 3% of the energy produced worldwide, much of which is wasted due to over-cooling and under utilization of IT equipment. This wastage in part stems from the lack of real-time visibility of fine-grained thermal distribution in DCs. Wireless sensing is an ideal candidate for DC monitoring as it is cost-effective, facility-friendly, and can be easily re-purposed. However, sensor measurements only characterize the current states of the system and operations, and are not suitable for predicting future conditions and answering what-if questions. In this talk, I discuss the needs and challenges of data center infrastructure management (DCIM) systems. I present our recent work on autonomous monitoring of data center operations: 1) LEMoNet, a novel two-tier ultra-low energy wireless sensor network protocol stack that have been demonstrated experimentally to achieve high data yield and a nodal life time up to 14.9 years on a single lithium battery; 2) Thermal-piloting for sensor localization in data centers and 3) surrogate thermal dynamics modelling for online predictions.

Bio:

Rong Zheng received her Ph.D. degree from the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and earned her M.E. and B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University, P.R. China. Between 2004 and 2012, she was on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science, University of Houston. She is now a Professor in the Department of Computing and Software in McMaster University, Canada.

Rong Zheng’s research interests include wireless networking, mobile computing and machine learning. She serves as an editor of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, and IEEE Transactions of Wireless Communication. Rong Zheng received a Discovery Accelerator Supplement from Natural Science and Engineering Council, Canada, in 2019 and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2006. She was a Joseph Ip Engineering fellow from 2015 to 2018.