ABSTRACT
Public research high performance computing (HPC) centres form a key part of the infrastructure backbone enabling scientific discovery, driving innovation and ensuring the competitive advantage and security of nations. This chapter provides managers of future HPC data centre construction projects with a collection of best practices as they are currently applied by the community. Funding agencies expect public research HPC data centres to achieve the usual lifetime of a building or infrastructure. A number of professional bodies and organisations provide standards specific to subsystems found in data centres such as power, cooling and ventilation. Deciding the power density and capacity for a new data centre is a challenging task. The increasing power density of Information Technology systems is pushing facilities to their limit. Defining design criteria for a data centre with a life expectancy of several decades, that must be able to accommodate multiple generations of HPC systems, is a complex task.
