Cooling as You Wish: Component-Level Cooling for Heterogeneous Edge Datacenters

As computing shifts toward the edge, edge datacenters are becoming essential for supporting diverse real-time applications. Unlike traditional cloud datacenters, edge datacenters face unique cooling challenges due to their requirements for proximity to end users, high density, and hardware heterogeneity. While warm water cooling is a promising technique for this infrastructure, current one-size-fits-all cooling strategies significantly compromise efficiency due to severe inter- and intra-component hotspots. In this work, we present CoolEdge⁺, a cost-effective component–level water cooling system for enhancing the cooling efficiency of edge datacenters. Specifically, CoolEdge⁺ dynamically adjusts the inlet water temperature for each component through a carefully designed water circulation architecture to mitigate inter-component hotspots. To address intra-component hotspots, it employs vapor chamber–based cold plates that rapidly dissipate heat without manual intervention or additional energy consumption. We further design a fine-grained cooling control framework that leverages a well-managed power capping approach to decide on customized inlet water temperatures and hardware power limits. Based on a hardware prototype and a real-world trace from Alibaba PAI, evaluation results show that CoolEdge⁺ reduces cooling energy consumption by up to 27.19% compared to existing coarse-grained systems, while maintaining performance guarantees. Compared to the state-of-the-art CoolEdge, CoolEdge⁺ saves 35.24% more cooling costs with comparable energy consumption and no latency violations.