Cadence Acquires Future Facilities, a Pioneer in Datacenter Digital Twins

This morning, Cadence announced the acquisition of Future Facilities. You've probably never heard of Future Facilities and I hadn't until I was on a conference call with one of their technologists late last year. They are a leading provider of electronics cooling analysis and energy performance optimization solutions for data center design and operations using physics-based 3D digital twins.

I wrote about some aspects of this in my post Thermal in Data Centers, but that was mostly at the low level of analyzing chips and boards. One thing that is usually true in design is that you don't get to the higher level simply by making the lower level have greater capacity and performance. RTL simulation is not faster gate-level simulation, which is not faster circuit simulation. And so it is with thermal analysis of data centers. Future Facilities' product portfolio includes an electronics thermal solution that augments Cadence’s leading Celsius Thermal Solver, as well as innovative computational fluid dynamics (CFD) electronics cooling simulation technology that optimizes the performance and cooling efficiency of power-hungry data centers. Their technology virtualizes the data center ecosystem, creating a 3D digital twin that allows operators to predict, visualize and quantify the impact of any change in the data center prior to implementation and during operations. This allows customers to optimize business goals with facility design and operational efficiencies. Future Facilities' proven technologies are used by leading hyperscaler, enterprise data center and colocation providers.

In fact, Future Facilities' product portfolio doesn't just augment Celsius, it is the CFD engine that drives the convection part of Celsius. Conduction and radiation are handled with other approaches such as finite element methods (FEM).

Digital Twins

Anyone designing a data center has a complex thermal management challenge. You have probably heard of the large amounts of electrical power required by data centers, but the other side of that coin is that almost all of that power gets turned into heat and the airflow and cooling systems have to get that out again. One aspect of that is to design chips that run at lower power, which was the focus of my earlier post linked to above. But the other is to use CFD techniques along with a wide range of f data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tools and power and cooling modules, Future Facilities simulates the impact of changes in servers on physical capacity, power infrastructure, and cooling. This increases uptime and capacity utilization by predicting hotspots before they occur. The solution also improves data center power usage effectiveness (PUE) by eliminating redundant power consumption.

Obviously, you don't want to discover that you have a thermal problem in your data center after you have constructed it. The best approach is to build a digital twin of the data center where a full analysis can be done entirely in the computer. This is similar to the digital twins used in domains like automotive—it is very expensive to build a physical model of a car and put it in a wind tunnel, much better to do all that modeling inside the computer with a digital twin.

Future Facilities' 6Sigma Digital Twin simulation and optimization platform lets customers model and analyze the performance of data centers by closely monitoring airflow, heat transfer, cooling, power, and capacity. The CFD simulations predict cost profiles and capacity and model improvement options. The addition of Future Facilities' experienced team and proven technologies enables Cadence to provide comprehensive chip, package, PCB, and system data center solutions that deliver efficiency gains and power savings and minimize downtime. As I said above, you need models at the appropriate abstraction level, and you can't just pull up models from the lower levels. Future Facilities has models for over 4,000 data center components.

Cadence Data Center

As part of the analysis of Future Facilities' capabilities, we did a study using one of Cadence's own data centers. We studied whether it was feasible to run the data center at a 10°F higher temperature, which would require less aggressive cooling and lead to a reduction of up to 20% in the energy required (just how much was part of the point of the study). Together, we created a digital twin providing a virtual representation of physical layout, cooling, and power.

The above images show some of the thermal analysis, on the left, a single rack, on the right, the data center a larger scale. Here are some comments from members of Cadence's IT team who were involved with the project:

This tool helped us to build a model of air flow dynamics up to the innermost part of the racks in the data center - which is impossible to do manually.

The algorithms are solid with very good accuracy

This will help us control the airflow thereby use the electricity to cool the data center much more effectively and efficiently

Can be deployed to many IT and Facilities teams for planning purposes

Global Issue

Datacenters are starting to get embroiled with politics over their power. For example, see the Bloomberg piece Big Tech Gets Caught Up in Europe’s Energy Politics. Quote from there:

When Google wanted to build a new $1.1 billion data center in the Luxembourg countryside, the government championed the investment and helped the company to acquire the land. Authorities in the Netherlands granted Meta Platforms Inc. permission for what promised to be an even bigger one, part of the country’s ambition to become Europe’s “digital hub.” The political metrics are now changing for the giant facilities. The two projects were paused after grassroots resistance from locals and environmental activists. But when the focus is on ensuring the lights stay on this winter, data computing and storage that can guzzle a small town’s worth of power are no longer as in vogue for some European governments.  

Learn More

See the Future Facilities' website. For more about Celsius, see the Celsius Thermal Solver page.

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