Electrical Commissioning Owner's Project Requirements: A Template

As the power demands of Supercomputers continue to grow, so does the demands of the electrical systems that support the infrastructure and building in which these Supercomputers reside. A typical new Supercomputer installation requires an upgrade to the design of the electrical system. As Supercomputers are refreshed roughly every 3 years which in turn drives electrical systems upgrades. The pre-design phase is critical for planning the installation of a new Supercomputer and requires documenting the overarching project purpose, goals, expectations, preferences, and limitations for the electrical systems, especially as the number of stakeholders increases. This Owner's Project Requirements (OPR) document then becomes guidance to the engineering and design teams for the development of the initial basis-of-design and subsequent construction documents. The electrical systems commissioning OPR provides a guideline for stakeholders to make sure that the electrical systems are well designed ‘up-front’ in the process of installation of a new Supercomputer. It also serves as a guiding checklist for the reader to use to inform their own generation of project guiding documents. This document will assist the owner and respective HPC infrastructure stakeholders in writing an OPR for the electrical systems supporting data centers or high-performance computing (HPC) facilities. This paper provides a template for developing an electrical system commissioning OPR. The template is sub-divided into sections that should be discussed and documented as part of the overall project requirements. The expectation is that this outline template forms a starting point for discussions for generating a guiding document for the commissioning of the electrical systems and standardizes the best practices and processes needed for the certification of the electrical commissioning of the HPC Supercomputers facilities.