Enabling Low-Cost Server-Level Power Monitoring in Data Centers Using Conducted EMI
Published in SenSys '23: Proceedings of the 21st ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, 2023
Recommended citation: Gupta, Pranjol Sen and Talukder, Zahidur and Abir, Tasnim Azad and Nguyen, Phuc and Islam, Mohammad A., "Enabling Low-Cost Server-Level Power Monitoring in Data Centers Using Conducted EMI," Proceedings of the 21st ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, 2023, pp. 237–250, doi: 10.1145/3625687.3625801. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3625687.3625801
Abstract: Server-level power monitoring in data centers can significantly contribute to its efficient management. Nevertheless, due to the cost of a dedicated power meter for each server, most data center power management only focuses on UPS or cluster-level power monitoring. In this paper, we propose a low-cost novel power monitoring approach that uses only one sensor to extract power consumption information of all servers. We utilize the conducted electromagnetic interference (EMI) of server power supplies to measure their power consumption from non-intrusive single-point voltage measurements. We present a theoretical characterization of conducted EMI generation in server power supply and its propagation through the data center power network. Using a set of ten commercial-grade servers (six Dell PowerEdge and four Lenovo ThinkSystems), we demonstrate that our approach can estimate each server’s power consumption with less than ~7% mean absolute error.