ABSTRACT
Thermal awareness is becoming an integral aspect in the design of all computer system components, ranging from micro-architectural structures within processors to peripherals, server boxes, racks, and even entire machine rooms. This is increasingly important due to the growing power density at all granularities of the system architecture. Deeper levels of integration, whether it be within a chip, components within a server, or machines in a rack/room, cause a large amount of power to be dissipated in a much smaller footprint. Since the reliability of computing components is very sensitive to heat, it is crucial to drain away excess heat from this small footprint. At the same time, the design of cooling systems is becoming prohibitively expensive, especially for the commodity market [14,28]. Consequently, emerging technologies are attempting to instead build systems for the common case-which may not be subject to the peak power densities, and thereby operate at a lower cooling cost-and resort to dynamic thermal management (DTM) solutions when temperatures
exceed safe operational values. This chapter explores one such technique for implementing DTM for disk-drives.
