Co-Design Optimization for Data Center Cooling System via Digital Twin

Abstract

Liquid-cooled exascale supercomputers dissipate heat through cooling plants organized as multiple parallel subloops, but how to allocate coolant distribution units (CDUs) across subloops and distribute flow among them has not been systematically addressed for facilities at this scale. This paper presents a three-layer optimization framework that jointly determines the integer partition of CDUs across subloops, the continuous flow fraction allocation, and the per-timestep co-design optimization of total flow rate and supply temperature subject to per-subloop thermal safety constraints. The Modelica simulation model is built based on the data of Frontier exascale supercomputer. By developing a reduced-order surrogate model, all feasible partitions of CDUs are evaluated across the full year operational. Three progressively richer operational strategies are compared, ranging from flow control optimization to full three-layer co-design optimization with dynamically adjusted flow fractions. The optimal design within the surrogate optimization problem is a two-subloop plant achieving 35.48% annual cooling energy savings, only 0.18% above the current three-subloop Frontier design at 35.30%. Most of the savings are delivered by supervisory co-optimization of total flow rate and supply temperature; the distinct role of flow fraction optimization is design robustness rather than additional raw savings. Flow fraction optimization compensates for any feasible CDU-to-subloop assignment, reducing the design sensitivity by 93% and providing a low-cost software-only pathway to near-optimal performance on the existing hardware. The framework is transferable to other liquid-cooled high-performance computing plants.