A regulated series-connected power delivery architecture for server clusters in highly efficient datacenters

Abstract

The series-connected power delivery architecture is an essentially lossless way to deliver power directly from a high voltage bus to a number of low-voltage loads. The benefts of this architecture can be combined with voltage regulation of individual nodes through a technique known as differential power processing. In contexts involving large numbers of high-power low-voltage loads like data centers, this combined power delivery and regulation technique can provide an order of magnitude loss reduction over the existing parallel power distribution architecture. This work describes the motivation, background, theory, design, implementation, and evaluation of the world's first fully-operational series-connected server cluster.