Random Forest and Sobol Method Based Data Center PUE Prediction

Data centers are critical infrastructures that support a multitude of business loads such as big data, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing. While providing the necessary computing power, the problem of high energy consumption in data centers has become a major obstacle limiting their scale-up, reliability and quality of service. Improving the power usage effectiveness (PUE) of data centers is an important way to improve the energy efficiency of data centers. With the development of theories and methods of machine learning, modeling, analysis and prediction of data center energy consumption using machine learning techniques has become a feasible option. In this study, several accurate PUE prediction models are constructed using neural networks and machine learning techniques for the PUE of a small air-cooled data center in actual operation, among which the mean absolute error of the optimal model reaches 0.29%. In addition, this paper also uses Random Forest and Sobol methods to model and conduct sensitivity analyses of key factors affecting data center PUE, revealing the relationship between data center operating parameters and PUE, and finding that the cooling system exhibits different energy consumption patterns under different IT equipment power conditions, which has a decisive impact on PUE. Based on these sensitivity analyses, we argue that for small air-cooled data centers, improving internal insulation and humidity is an important strategy for optimizing PUE.