Ground temperature restoration characteristics are the crucial factors to evaluate whether a ground source heat pump system can keep long time steady operation. They are mainly dependent on soil thermal properties, layout of pile group, operation/shutoff ratio, cooling/heating load, thermal imbalance ratio and so on. On the one hand, several types of vertical pile foundation heat exchangers are intercompared to determine the most efficient one by performance test and numerical method. On the other hand, according to the layout of pile group of a practical engineering and running conditions of a GSHP system in Shanghai, the temperature distribution during a period of five years is numerically studied. The numerical results are analyzed and are used to provide some guidance for the design of large-scale GSHP system.