Toward Physics-Informed Machine Learning for Data Center Operations: A Tropical Case Study

Data centers are the backbone of computing capacity. Operating data centers in the tropical regions faces unique challenges due to consistently high ambient temperature and elevated relative humidity throughout the year. These conditions result in increased cooling costs to maintain the reliability of the computing systems. While existing machine learning-based approaches have demonstrated potential to elevate operations to a more proactive and intelligent level, their deployment remains dubious due to concerns about model extrapolation capabilities and associated system safety issues. To address these concerns, this article proposes incorporating the physical characteristics of data centers into traditional data-driven machine learning solutions. We begin by introducing the data center system, including the relevant multiphysics processes and the data-physics availability. Next, we outline the associated modeling and optimization problems and propose an integrated, physics-informed machine learning system to address them. Using the proposed system, we present relevant applications across varying levels of operational intelligence. A case study on an industry-grade tropical data center is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Finally, we discuss key challenges and highlight potential future directions.

Fusion Intelligence for Digital Twinning AI Data Centers: A Synergistic GenAI-PhyAI Approach

The explosion in artificial intelligence (AI) applications is pushing the development of AI-dedicated data centers (AIDCs), creating management challenges that traditional methods and standalone AI solutions struggle to address. While digital twins are beneficial for AI-based design validation and operational optimization, current AI methods for their creation face limitations. Specifically, physical AI (PhyAI) aims to capture the underlying physical laws, which demands extensive, case-specific customization, and generative AI (GenAI) can produce inaccurate or hallucinated results. We propose Fusion Intelligence, a novel framework synergizing GenAI's automation with PhyAI's domain grounding. In this dual-agent collaboration, GenAI interprets natural language prompts to generate tokenized AIDC digital twins. Subsequently, PhyAI optimizes these generated twins by enforcing physical constraints and assimilating real-time data. Case studies demonstrate the advantages of our framework in automating the creation and validation of AIDC digital twins. These twins deliver predictive analytics to support power usage effectiveness (PUE) optimization in the design stage. With operational data collected, the digital twin accuracy is further improved compared with pure physics-based models developed by human experts. Fusion Intelligence offers a promising pathway to accelerate digital transformation. It enables more reliable and efficient AI-driven digital transformation for a broad range of mission-critical infrastructures.

Dual-Splitting Conformal Prediction for Multi-Step Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting is crucial for applications like resource scheduling and risk management, where multi-step predictions provide a comprehensive view of future trends. Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) is a mainstream approach for addressing forecasting uncertainties, with Conformal Prediction (CP) gaining attention due to its model-agnostic nature and statistical guarantees. However, most variants of CP are designed for single-step predictions and face challenges in multi-step scenarios, such as reliance on real-time data and limited scalability. This highlights the need for CP methods specifically tailored to multi-step forecasting. We propose the Dual-Splitting Conformal Prediction (DSCP) method, a novel CP approach designed to capture inherent dependencies within time-series data for multi-step forecasting. Experimental results on real-world datasets from four different domains demonstrate that the proposed DSCP significantly outperforms existing CP variants in terms of the Winkler Score, achieving a performance improvement of up to 23.59% compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we deployed the DSCP approach for renewable energy generation and IT load forecasting in power management of a real-world trajectory-based application, achieving an 11.25% reduction in carbon emissions through predictive optimization of data center operations and controls.