What does PUE measure in a data center?
Why D is the answer
Total facility energy compared with IT energy
Power usage effectiveness. A value closer to 1 means less overhead.
In detail
- PUE compares total facility energy with IT energy.
- Closer to 1 means less overhead.
- Closer to 1 means less overhead.
Use case
An illustrative scenario, not a real incident.
A site uses 1.5 MW in total for 1 MW of IT load, so its PUE is 1.5.
See it in different ways
flowchart LR A["GPU rack density"] --> B["Power per rack"] B --> C["Heat to remove"] C --> D["Air or liquid cooling"] D --> E["Floor and facility check"]
stateDiagram-v2 [*] --> Power Power --> Cooling: heat follows power Cooling --> Floor: weight limits Floor --> Delivery Delivery --> [*]
flowchart LR S0["Total facility energy"] --> S1["Divide by IT energy"] --> S2["Result"]
Key point: PUE compares total and IT energy.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. The share of GPUs that are running at any time
- That is utilization.
- B. The number of servers per square meter of floor
- That is density.
- C. The peak bandwidth of the data center network
- That is bandwidth.