Advancing Digital Twin Technology in the
Data Center Industry
At Future Facilities, we seek to help data center designers, vendors, owners and operators find ways to improve how they design and operate data centers. With over fifteen years of experience, our internal Research, Engineering and Product Development teams conduct research to solve real problems that our customers face.
Our solution is the 6Sigma Digital Twin. The 6Sigma Digital Twin, powered by CFD, is a virtual model of a data center that accurately reflects the key behaviors of the physical data center. Our goal is to pioneer the use of the 6Sigma Digital Twin to improve how data centers are designed and operated.
Our Research
Our contribution extends to helping define and improve industry standards by participating in activities organized by leading institutions, professional bodies and academia, including:
We are extremely proud to participate in ASHRAE data center related committees and on standards to help shape the future of data center design and operation.
We are very fortunate to have had the opportunity to be an active member of the NSF I/UCRC Energy Smart Electronic Systems (ES2) program partnering with State University of New York, Binghamton, University of Texas at Arlington and Villanova University who are conducting valuable research for us and the other Industrial Advisory Board members to help shape the future of data center design and operation.
As a trade association, the DCA influences standards bodies and communicates data center information to the industry. We feel it is important to be represented in this unique organization and to be involved in what is happening in Europe.
It has been almost 10 years since Future Facilities was asked to help and provide material for the DCPro courses. Our expertise and the ability of our software to communicate what is happening in a data center effectively aids attendees achieve their learning objectives.
Our Publications
From external modeling to liquid cooling, our Research Team has published and continues to publish technical papers on contemporary issues in the data center industry.
Analysis of airflow imbalances in an open compute high density storage data center“This article reports experimental and numerical testing performed to characterize the operation and reliability of the open compute (OC) storage system in contained environment from server to aisle levels.”
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Comparison of data driven modeling approaches for temperature prediction in data centers“This study compares the performance of three different DDM methods, namely Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Support Vector Regression (SVR), Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) in predicting both steady-state and transient rack inlet air temperature distributions in data centers.”
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Supply Air Temperature Prediction in an Air-Handling Unit Using Artificial Neural Network“The focus of this study is to predict Supply Air Temperature using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) which can overcome limitations of CFD such as high cost, need of an expertise and large computation time."
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Impact of Tile Design on the Thermal Performance of Open and Enclosed Aisles“In this study, three types of floor tiles with different open area, opening geometry, and understructure are considered. Experimentally validated detail models of tiles were implemented in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to address the impact of tile design on the cooling of information technology (IT) equipment in both open and enclosed aisle configurations.”
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Comprehensive Experimental and Computational Analysis of a Fully Contained Hybrid Server Cabinet“In a closed, hybrid air–water cooled server cabinet, the generated heat is removed by a self-contained system that does not interact with the room level air cooling system. Here, a hybrid-cooled enclosed cabinet and all its internal components were characterized experimentally in steady-state mode (e.g., experimentally determined heat-exchanger effectiveness and IT characterization).”
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Quantifying data center performance“This paper shows the PI values for a number of existing data centers and discusses the need for performance data to understand what performance might be expected for different data center types, cooling infrastructures, locations and associated climates.”
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Performance analysis and shape optimization of a water-cooled impingement micro-channel heat sink including manifolds“A numerical model was developed to predict the heat sink performance [of a water-cooled impingement micro-channel heat sink including manifolds].”
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Application of a multilevel unstructured staggered solver to thermal electronic simulations“This paper describes an application of a novel computational fluid dynamics solution procedure to thermal electronic simulations.”
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CFD optimization of the cooling of Yosemite open compute server“The need to minimize the environmental impact of Data Centers by optimizing energy consumption and material use is increasing…This study mainly focuses on air flow optimization in the Yosemite platform to improve its overall cooling performance.”
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Our Leadership Team
Future Facilities is an engineering organization unlike any other in the data center industry. Because so much of what we do hasn't been done before, the line between research and product development is wonderfully blurred. The engineer is often engaged in research, and the researcher in engineering.
Mark Seymour, Chief Technical Officer (CTO)
With more than 30 years of simulation and measurement experience, and over 25 applied to building HVAC, Mark Seymour is CTO and a founder of Future Facilities. He’s a chartered member of the Society for the Environment and an active member of ASHRAE TC 9.9, holding the position of research chair. He is also chair of the NSF-ES2 research project industrial advisory board.
Kourosh Nemati, Applications Engineer & Research Manager
Kourosh Nemati received his doctoral degree from Binghamton University. He has published 35 technical papers and presented 20 lectures in data center related conferences, including ASHRAE, InterPACK and ITherm. He currently focuses on data center thermal management projects, specializing in transport in data centers using both empirical and numerical approaches.
Thought Leadership at Future Facilities
We work to push our industry forward through ground-breaking research. Learn more about our thought leadership at Future Facilities through our Blog.
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