Introduction for Journal of Electronic Packaging Special Section on Data Centers

Abstract

As the digital factories of the information technology (IT) age, data centers are showing an unprecedented growth. From 2012 to 2016 alone, the global data center traffic is expected to increase four fold [1,21,2], requiring new facilities to be built at the compound annual growth rate of 15.78% during the same period, with the associated positive economic impact. These beneficial outcomes are tempered by concerns about sustainability of such explosive growth, in particular, the energy and water usage burden of the new facilities. Larger facilities can consume tens of megawatts of electric power, with 20–50% of it used for cooling. As such, energy efficient thermal management of current and future facilities has emerged as a significant research challenge and is the focus of this Special Section.