Data Center Cooling Management And Analysis – A Model Based Approach
Rongliang Zhou, Zhikui Wang, Cullen E. Bash, Alan McReynolds
Abstract— As the hub of information aggregation, processing,
and dissemination, today’s data centers consume significant
amount of energy. The data center electricity consumption
mainly comes from the IT equipment and the supporting
cooling facility that manages the thermal status of the IT
equipment. The traditional data center cooling facility usually
consists of chilled water cooled computer room air conditioning
(CRAC) units and chillers that provide chilled water to the
CRAC units. Electricity used to power the cooling facility
could take up to a half of the total data center electricity
consumption, and is a major contributor to the data center
total cost of ownership. While the data center industry has
established the best practice to improve the cooling efficiency,
the majority of it is rule of thumbs providing only qualitative
guidance. In order to provide on demand cooling and achieve
improved cooling efficiency, a model based description of the
data center thermal environment is indispensable. In this paper,
a computationally efficient multivariable model capturing the
effects of CRAC units blower speed and supply air temperature
(SAT) on rack inlet temperatures is introduced, and model
identification and reduction procedures are discussed. Using the
model developed, data center cooling system design and analysis
such as thermal zone mapping, CRAC units load balancing, and
hot spot detection are investigated.
I. INTRODUCTION
Due to the ever-increasing computing and hence power
density of the IT equipment, today’s data centers require
tremendous amount of cooling power to maintain the desired
thermal status. According to [1], [2], about a third to a
half of data center total power consumption goes to the
cooling system. Highly efficient cooling systems are thus
indispensable to reduce the total cost of ownership and
environmental footprint of data centers.
Figure 1 shows a typical raised-floor air-cooled data center
with hot aisles and cold aisles separated by rows of IT
equipment racks. The thermal requirements of IT equipment
are usually specified in terms of the inlet air temperatures
of the equipment [3]. The equipment temperature thresholds
are not necessarily uniform across the entire data center but
are dependent on the different functions, such as computing,
storage, and networking, which the IT equipment serves.
Service contracts of the IT workload hosted in the IT
equipment can also affect the temperature threshold.
The blowers of the Computer Room Air Conditioner
(CRAC) units pressurize the under-floor plenum with cool
air, which in turn is drawn through the vent tiles located in
front of the racks in the cold aisles. Hot air carrying the waste
heat from the IT equipment is rejected into the hot aisles.
Depending on its design, the CRAC unit internal control can
regulate the chilled water valve opening to track the given
Sustainable Ecosystems Research Group, HP Labs, Hewlett-
Packard Company, 1501 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304-1126.
{firstname.lastname}@hp.com
reference of Supply Air Temperature (SAT) or Return Air
Temperature (RAT). The flow rate of the cool air supply can
also be tuned continuously if a Variable Frequency Drive
(VFD) is installed for each CRAC unit to vary the speed of
its blowers.
For the particular configuration shown in Fig. 1, neither
the cold aisles nor the hot aisles are contained and hence air
streams are free to mix. Most of the hot air in the hot aisles
returns to the CRAC units, but a small portion of it might
escape into the cold aisles from the top, the sides, or even the
bottom of the racks and causes recirculation. Recirculation
can be also due to the reverse flows with certain IT equipment
(some network switches, for example) of which the internal
fans blow the hot exhaust air from the hot aisle into the
cold aisle. The inlet air flow of the IT equipment is thus
a mixture of cool air from the vent tiles in its vicinity and
the recirculated hot air [4]. The recirculation of hot air into
the cold aisle generates entropy and lowers the data center
cooling efficiency.
Fig. 1. Typical Raised Floor Data Center
The challenge of data center cooling management is the
coordination of CRAC units blower speeds and supply air
temperature (SAT) tuning to minimize the power consump-
tion of both CRAC units and chiller plants, while maintaining
hundreds or even thousands of rack inlet temperatures below
their respective thresholds. The major hurdle to overcome
this challenge is the lack of simplified and computationally
efficient models that are capable of capturing the complex en-
ergy and mass flows within the data centers and performing
transient cooling analysis. Computational Fluid Dynamics
(CFD) have been used extensively for data center cooling
system design, but most of the applications are built upon
steady-state system analysis. The few CFD based transient
cooling system performance analyses reported so far have
been focused on predicting system responses to cooling fail-
ures. Beitelmal and Patel [5], for example, use transient CFD
simulation to investigate data center temperature distribution
change caused by a malfunctioning CRAC unit, and show
that acceptable rack inlet temperatures can still be maintained
if the IT load and available cooling resources can be appro-
priately re-organized. In another application, CFD simulation
is used to analyze the various failure scenarios of IBM’s
cooling infrastructure design for the water cooled cluster of
11 racks [6]. While transient CFD analysis provides valuable
insights in data center cooling system design as well as
measures to handle different failure modes, it is impractical
to use it for real-time data center cooling management. This
is partly because data center IT load could change from
minute to minute, and transient CFD analysis is normally
time consuming and could take hours or even longer to finish.
In addition, as pointed out in [7], [8],it is usually difficult to
capture the true IT and cooling configurations in sufficient
details to predict the resulting environment with desired
accuracy. Targeting higher computationally efficiency, some
alternative approaches have been utilized or developed by
researchers for transient data center cooling performances
analysis. Khankari [9] uses a simple energy balance model
to investigate the availability of data center thermal mass
in various configurations during power shutdown, Kummert
[10] studies the effects of chiller failure and cooling system
thermal inertia on room temperature variations, and Zhang
together with VanGilder develops data center transient ther-
mal models. These alternative approaches, however, achieve
the improved computational efficiency by sacrificing the
spatial non-uniformity witnessed in most data centers, and
hence are not suitable for real-time data center thermal
management either.
In an attempt to bridge this gap, the authors’ recent work
[11], [12] develops physics based state-space models that
describe the air flow transport and distribution within the
data centers. The parameters of the models are obtained from
measurement data of system identification experiments, and
hence are ensured to reflect the data center reality empha-
sized in [8]. The physics based data center cooling model
is utilized in [11] to coordinate zonal (CRAC units blower
speeds and SAT) and local cooling actuation (adaptive vent
tiles), and validation on a small portion of a research data
center shows significant cooling power savings. Using the
same but simplified physics based model, the authors present
in [12] a decentralized model predictive control (MPC)
design approach for CRAC units SAT and blower speed
regulation targeting large scale data centers. Compared with
the commonly used CFD modeling, the model employed in
this paper is computationally light without losing the data
center spatial non-uniformity, and is suitable for both off-
line analysis and online dynamic control. In this paper, the
computationally efficient model developed is used to perform
critical cooling system design and analysis tasks such as
thermal zone mapping, CRAC units load balancing, and hot
spot detection.
The other sections of this paper are organized as follows.
Section II first briefly introduces the dynamic rack inlet
temperature model we developed previously using the energy
and mass balance principles, followed by a discussion on the
model identification and reduction procedures. In Section III,
we demonstrate how model based grouping of rack inlet
temperatures and CRAC units can be used for improved
thermal zone mapping and coordination of decentralized
cooling controllers. Section IV defines Hot Spot Index (HSI)
using the model parameters and shows that it is powerful in
data center hot spot detection. Finally, Section V concludes
the paper with a summary of the work presented.
II. DYNAMIC COOLING SYSTEM MODELING
AND MODEL PARAMETER IDENTIFICATION
A. Dynamic Cooling System Modeling
In this subsection, we briefly introduce simplified mod-
els from the basic mass and energy balance principles to
characterize the complex mass and energy flows within the
raised-floor air-cooled data centers. Since only the modeling
results are presented, the interested readers can refer to [11],
[12] for more detailed description on how these modes are
derived.
In the open environment, air flow coming into the IT
equipment inlet is a mixture of the cool air from the
CRAC units (through the vent tiles) and the recirculated hot
(exhaust) air that escapes into the cold aisle. In hot aisle
contained environment, although significantly reduced, recir-
culation could still exist because of imperfect containment,
or the reverse flows from some network switches that draw
hot air from the hot aisle for cooling and reject the even
hotter air (up to 40◦ C) into the cold aisle.
Fig. 2. Air Mixing at the Rack Inlet
Consider a small control volume in the proximity of the
rack inlet with mass m and temperature T , as shown in
Fig. 2. Cool and recirculated hot air flows with mass and
temperature (mc , Tc ) and (mh , Th ) enter the control volume,
mix well with the air (m, T ) already in the volume, leave
the control volume altogether and enter the rack inlet with
total mass m∗ and temperature T ∗ . It can be found that the
temperature change ∆T of the air within the control volume
before and after the mixing is:
mc (Tc − T ) mh (Th − T )
∆T , T ∗ − T = + , (1)
m + mc + mh m + mc + mh
which reveals that the influence of cool and recirculated hot
air on rack inlet temperature can be mainly captured by
mc (Tc − T ) and mh (Th − T ), respectively.
In raised-floor data centers, all the CRAC units pressurize
the under floor plenum by blowing the cool air into it. The
cool air ṁc flowing into a rack inlet could come from all
the CRAC units and hence:
NCRAC
X The remaining part of the experimental data can then be
ṁc = bj · V F Dj , (2)
j=1
in which NCRAC is the number of CRAC units, bj quantifies
the cooling air contribution from the j th CRAC unit to a
specific rack inlet, and V F D stands for the speed of the
blower in the percentage of its maximum.
It can be seen from Eqn. (1) that both cool and recirculated
hot air contribute to the rack inlet temperature change ∆T .
Since the recirculated hot air flow is beyond direct control,
we can lump its effect into a time-varying term C and
simplify Eqn. (1) as:
ṁc ∆t(Tc − T )
T∗ − T = + C, (3)
m + ṁc ∆t + mh
in which ∆t is the length of the sampling interval.
The discrete form of Eqn. (3) is:
T (k + 1) =T (k)
NCRAC
+{
X
gj · [SATj (k) − T (k)] · V F Dj (k)}
j=1
+ C(k),
(4)
in which T (k + 1) and T (k) are rack inlet temperatures at
time steps k +1 and k, respectively. In Eqn. (4), gj quantifies
the combined influences of VFD and SAT tuning of the j th
CRAC unit, and also lumps the effects of parameters bj , ∆t
together with the nonlinearity associated with ṁc .
The vector form of Eqn. (4) for multiple rack inlet
temperatures is:
T (k + 1) = T (k) + F + C, (5)
in which
T = [T1 , T2 , · · · , TNT ]T ,
F = [F1 , F2 , · · · , FNT ]T ,
NCRAC
X gi,j ≥ λ · gi,max ,
Fi = gi,j [SATj (k) − Ti (k)]V F Dj (k), 1 ≤ i ≤ NT ,
j=1
C = [C1 , C2 , · · · , CNT ]T ,
and NT is the number of rack inlet temperatures of interest.
B. Model Parameter Identification and Model Reduction
Parameters of the dynamic rack inlet temperature model
described in Eqn. (5), including gi,j (1 ≤ i ≤ NT , 1 ≤ j ≤
NCRAC ) and C can be obtained through model identification
experiments. During the experiments, the various available
cooling actuation, such as CRAC unit blower speed and SAT,
is perturbed through sequential/simultaneous step changes or
other specifically designed identification sequences. Both the
cooling actuation signals and the corresponding temperature
response at the rack inlets are collected.
In order to find the model parameters gi,j (1 ≤ i ≤
NT , 1 ≤ j ≤ NCRAC ) and C, a nonlinear optimization can
be performed on part of the experimental data collected such
that the parameterized model minimizes the error between
model prediction and rack inlet temperature measurements.
used to validate the model identified. Note that after the
model identification data is collected, the model parameter
identification can be performed per rack inlet temperature,
since different rack inlet temperatures only have input cou-
pling. The associated parallelization can be exploited to
speed up the model identification process and is extremely
useful for large scale data centers with thousands of rack
inlet temperatures.
From the physical perspective, every rack inlet temper-
ature of interest is influenced by all the CRAC units, and
correspondingly each CRAC unit affects all the rack inlet
temperatures within the data center. As a result, the matrix
G = [gi,j ] (1 ≤ i ≤ NT , 1 ≤ j ≤ NCRAC ) obtained
from the model identification process is fully populated.
However, it is observed that most rack inlet temperatures
are usually affected by a selected small number of CRAC
units, and that this subset of CRAC units varies with the
location of the specific rack inlet temperature relative to the
layout of the cooling facilities. Reflected on the dynamic
rack inlet temperature model identified, this observation
manifests through the fact that for any rack inlet temperature
Ti (1 ≤ i ≤ NT ) some of the gi,j (1 ≤ j ≤ NCRAC )
items are dominant with noticeably larger values than the
rest, suggesting that the non-dominant items may be ignored
without significant effects on modeling accuracy.
In order to obtain a sparse G matrix and hence take the
associated advantages such as system decoupling and par-
allelization of sub-problem solving, we can perform model
reduction for each rack inlet temperature. For rack inlet
temperature Ti , define
gi,max = max(gi,j ), 1 ≤ j ≤ NCRAC .
In the reduced matrix Gr , item gi,j
r
is set to the corresponding
gi,j if and only if
r
and otherwise gi,j = 0. In the inequality above λ is a
adjustable threshold between 0 and 1. The physical inter-
pretation of this model reduction process is that in order
to regulate a specific rack inlet temperature, we can only
consider the CRAC units that have significant influence over
it and simply ignore the CRAC units that just marginally
affect this rack inlet temperature of interest.
III. M ODEL BASED G ROUPING OF CRAC U NITS AND
R ACK I NLET T EMPERATURES
The matrix Gr obtained after the model reduction process
trims the weak relationships between CRAC units and rack
inlet temperatures, maintaining only the strong ones. The
sparse structure of Gr implies the natural grouping of CRAC
units and rack inlet temperatures, which can be used for both
static system analysis and dynamic system control.
A. Thermal Zone Mapping
Previously, CRAC units thermal zone mapping has been
based on the absolute values of thermal correlation index
(TCI) defined in [13] as:
∆Ti
T CIi,j = , (6)
∆SATCRAC,j
which quantifies the steady-state response of the ith rack inlet
temperature to a step change in the SAT of the j th CRAC
unit. This steady-state system information based method,
however, has a drawback since the TCI values obtained
through the system commissioning process is dependent
on the blower speeds settings of the CRAC units. The
thermal zone of a particular CRAC unit established using
TCI could expand or shrink when its blower speed increases
or decreases, leading to a family of data center thermal zone
mappings under different CRAC units blower speed settings.
The drawback of TCI based thermal zone mapping method
outlined above comes from the fact that only steady-state
system information is utilized and the rich dynamic system
information embedded in system parameter such as the Gr
matrix is left out. From the CRAC’s perspective, CRAC #j
effectively affects rack inlet temperature Ti (1 ≤ i ≤ NT )
r
only if the corresponding item gi,j of matrix Gr is nonzero.
th
The nonzero items of the j column of Gr defines the
zone of influence of the j th CRAC units, with the value
of the corresponding item denoting the exact intensity of the
influence of CRAC #j on a particular rack inlet temperature.
Using this model based approach, Fig. 3 shows the thermal
zones of a research data center with 8 CRAC units and 10
rows of racks, and the thermal zone of each CRAC unit
is approximated by a balloon. The significant overlapping
between the thermal zones of CRAC #3 and #4, and
CRAC #5 and #6 are clearly indicated in the figure. Since
CRAC units with overlapping of thermal zones all affect
the rack inlet temperatures in the overlapping area, some
coordination might be necessary between them such that they
may have balanced loads when managing the shared rack
inlet temperatures.
Fig. 3. Model Based Thermal Zone Mapping of a Research Data Center
Compared with thermal correlation index (TCI) based
method, the thermal zone identified using the model based
method for each CRAC unit does not vary with its blower
speed, since Gr captures the combined effects of CRAC unit
SAT and blower speed on rack inlet temperatures. Because of
the consistency of this model based thermal zone mapping
method, it is valuable for distributed controller design of
large scale data centers. In the authors’ previous work [12],
a decentralized controller is designed for each CRAC unit
to regulate the rack inlet temperatures within its established
zone of influence.
B. Load Balancing Based on CRAC Units Grouping
In raised floor air cooled data centers, there might be
strong interactions between neighboring CRAC units, thus
causing load balancing problems such as load piggybacking
and load swapping, which is not uncommon in decentralized
or decoupled CRAC unit controller design.
In load piggybacking, one of the CRAC units may keep
increasing its cooling provisioning in order to drive a tem-
porary rack inlet temperature violation below the specified
threshold, and part of the cool air from this CRAC unit may
also be routed to the racks intended to be cooled by the
neighboring CRAC units because of the shared underfloor
plenum. Observing the rack temperature decrease in its
thermal zone, the neighboring CRAC units may piggyback
on the CRAC unit with high load and decrease its own
load provisioning and in turn cause the high load CRAC
unit to reach an even higher load. Load piggybacking often
manifests itself as a high load CRAC unit with low SAT
and high blower speed, with its neighbor(s) working at the
opposite extreme with high SAT and low blower speed. The
significant load imbalance between CRAC units from load
piggybacking may shorten the CRAC units’ life span, and the
mixing of supply air streams with big temperature difference
also generates entropy and lowers the overall data center
cooling efficiency.
Apart from load piggybacking, load swapping can also be
observed for CRAC units that are individually controlled by
different controllers. When stuck in load swapping, the high
and low load status could switch back and forth between
neighboring CRAC units, resulting in oscillation in the SAT
and blower speeds. Load swapping could be triggered by
the temperature disturbances such as a sudden and temporary
load increase from a server rack, opening of a cold aisle vent
tile due to maintenance, or introduction of free cooling from
the outside air, and may not stop without intervention of the
operator.
The root cause of both load piggybacking and load swap-
ping is lack of coordination in decentralized or decoupled
CRAC unit controllers, in which the physical input coupling
between neighboring thermal zones are neglected. The local
controller for each thermal zone tries to maintain the ther-
mal status within the zone using the least efforts (usually
through minimization of the cooling power required), and
uncoordinated local optimization could easily lead to global
suboptimal solution (load piggybacking) or instability (load
swapping). In order to address these problems, simple and yet
effective load balancing mechanism needs to be established
between neighboring thermal zones to coordinate the outputs
of the CRAC units.
The first step toward CRAC load balancing is to identify
for each thermal zone the neighboring thermal zones that it
needs to coordinate with. For each rack inlet temperature
Ti , the corresponding temperature violation Tv,i over its
reference temperature Tref,i is defined as:
Tv,i = Ti − Tref,i .
In the j th thermal zone, the rack inlet temperature with the
highest Tv,i is called its master sensor, and is denoted as
Tm,j . At each control interval, the local controller of each
thermal zone broadcasts the index and reference temperature
of its master sensor, together with its CRAC unit’s current
SAT and blower speed setting. Each local controller also
receives broadcast messages from all other thermal zones,
and compares its master sensor with its neighbors. After this
information exchange, each local controller has a most recent
snapshot of the settings of all the cooling controllers, and
CRAC units sharing the same master sensor can be grouped
for load balancing purpose.
In the case that several thermal zones share the same
master sensor, it is desirable that all the CRAC units in this
group coordinate to the same SAT since mixing of supply
air streams at different temperatures generates entropy and
lowers cooling efficiency. In order to coordinate to the same
SAT, the thermal zone with the highest SAT of the group
adds to the SAT setting of its local controller an additional
load balancing term:
SATc = k · (SATmin − SATmax ),
in which SATmin and SATmax are the lowest and highest
CRAC unit SAT settings of the group, and k is appropriate
feedback gain for SAT coordination. Note that in this co-
ordination mechanism, load balancing is only performed on
the low load CRAC unit to increase its provisioning, and the
reason is to minimize the chance of rack inlet temperature
violation during the load balancing process.
Figure 4 shows the experimental results in a research
data center as shown in Fig. 3 with 8 CRAC units. Before
load balancing is enabled shortly after time t = 1hr, the
data center has already entered a relatively steady state.
CRAC #3/4 share the same master sensor, and CRAC #5/6
share another master sensor. Due to the lack of coordination
between the decentralized controller which each controls a
CRAC unit, the supply air temperature difference is as large
as 2.2 ◦ C between CRAC #3 and #4, and 1.8 ◦ C between
CRAC #5 and #6. After load balancing is enforced at time
t = 1hr, CRAC #3 and #4 quickly converge to the same
SAT, and the same is true for CRAC #5 and #6. The blower
speeds of these four CRAC units, denoted by the percentage
of the maximum of variable frequency drive (VFD) output,
also reach their new steady-state settings after load balancing
is enforced as shown in Fig. 4(b). The trajectories of other
CRAC units are not shown here since their settings do not
change for the duration of the experiment, either because
they do not share master sensors (CRAC #1 and #2) or
load balancing has already been achieved (CRAC #7 and
#8).
(a) SAT (b) VFD
Fig. 4. Load Balancing
IV. M ODEL BASED H OT S POT D ETECTION
In data center cooling management, ability to identify
the hot spots is essential. While examining the snapshot or
temporal trends of the data center rack inlet temperature
distribution is helpful, a systematic approach is needed to
automate the process.
The detection of hot spots can not be accomplished
without the definition of an appropriate metric or measure.
While most people tend to believe that the highest rack
inlet temperature within the entire data center or a thermal
zone indicates a hot spot and thus temperature seems to be
the right measure, it is not always the case. First, location
where the highest rack inlet temperature observed within
the data center or a thermal zone could easily change as
the settings of the CRAC units vary. A hot spot previously
identified could disappear as the thermal zone it belongs to
is over provisioned while the neighboring thermal zones are
configured to be insufficiently provisioned. Second, the hot
spot detection results using temperature measure might be
subject to various disturbances and dependent on whether
the detection is performed when the data center has reached
a relatively steady state. These drawbacks indicate that using
temperature as the measure for data center hot spot detection
lacks consistency. New and improved metric for data center
hot spot detection needs to be developed.
In order to address this problem, we define the model
based Hot Spot Index (HSI) for data center hot spot de-
tection. For a rack inlet temperature Ti with reduced order
model:
Ti (k + 1) =Ti (k)
NCRAC
X
r
+{ gi,j · [SATj (k) − Ti (k)] · V F Dj (k)}
j=1
+ Ci ,
HSI is defined as:
Ci
HSI , , (7)
k gir k1
in which vector gir = [gi,1
r r
gi,2 r
· · · gi,NCRAC
], and k · k1
stands for the vector 1-norm. From a physical perspective,
HSI measures the ratio between effects of hot air recircu-
lation and CRAC units tuning on a specific rack inlet tem-
perature. A high HSI value means that hot air recirculation
is severe while the cooling effects from all the CRAC units
are weak at the location of interest, and hence indicates a
potential hot spot.

Fig. 5. HSI Values for Rack Inlet Locations of a Research Data Center in
Descending Order
Figure 5 shows the HSI values in descending order for
the 192 rack inlet temperature locations in the research data
center shown in Fig. 3. A closer look at the locations with
the leading HSI values points to rack inlet temperatures at
rack B6, D5, D6, and G9. Among these hot spots, rack B6,
D5, and D6 are affected by severe reverse flow from the
network switches mentioned earlier, while G9 is at the end
of the row G and is most affected by the hot air escaped from
the hot aisle. The locations of these hot spots agree with the
observations of the research data center. Furthermore, the
severity of these hot spots can also be indicated by their
corresponding HSI values, which can not be easily detected
by simply observing the data center temperature distribution.
Rack B6, for example, has higher HSI values, and it is found
that the reverse flow is much more severe than that of rack
D5, and D6, which follow B6 in HSI ranking.
(a) Uniform CRAC Settings (b) Nonuniform CRAC Settings
Fig. 6. Rack Inlet Temperatures (in Descending Order of HSI)
Compared with HSI based method, relying solely on data
center temperature distribution for hot spot detection could
lead to misleading results. Figure 6, for example, shows
the temperature distribution of the aforementioned research
data center in descending order of HSI. In Fig. 6(a), all
the 8 CRAC units are configured with the same SAT and
blower speed. The trend of rack inlet temperatures roughly
follows that of HSI values as shown in Fig. 5, meaning that
in this particular data center cooling configuration the rack
inlet temperatures can be used as a reference for hot spot
detection. The rack inlet temperatures as shown in Fig. 6(b),
however, vary significantly in both amplitudes and ranking
relative to each other with a nonuniform setting of CRAC
units. Although the five rack inlet locations with the highest
HSI values still have the highest temperatures, other hot spots
identified by HSI based method, such as those in rack D5
and G9, now have relatively low temperatures among all the
rack inlet locations and hence could be left out in hot spot
detection.
V. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, a data center management and analysis
scheme based on dynamic rack inlet temperature model is
introduced. The model parameter identification and model
reduction procedures are both discussed. Improved thermal
zone mapping approach is introduced through model based
rack inlet temperature grouping, and load balancing mech-
anism is investigated through grouping of CRAC units. In
order to detect the hot spots within data centers, Hot Spot
Index (HSI) is defined using the model parameters and
proves to be effective in data center hot spot detection.
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