Case study · Commissioning
Confidential HPC Data Center, Austin Metro
A 2 MW high-performance computing facility built for virtually zero water use in Texas. First CEEDA Gold certification in North America. Named "Most Innovative" at the 2014 DCD awards.
The challenge
HPC density, zero water, in the Texas heat.
Texas in summer is a brutal place to cool a data center, especially one built to run on almost no water. Standard cooling at HPC densities in that climate consumes enormous amounts of it. The client knew that and set a constraint that most operators would have waived: essentially zero water consumption, sustained through continuous HPC and ML workloads, in the Austin heat.
That one constraint rewrites the cooling architecture. Negative pressure chilled water with dry coolers gets you there, but a system designed on paper to avoid evaporative cooling still has to be commissioned precisely enough to validate thermal performance under real HPC load. A facility that hits the specification in theory but fails when the compute environment runs hard delivers nothing.
The schedule was tight. The stakeholders were split across the UK, Seattle, and Austin, with different technical cultures and decision speeds. And CEEDA Gold certification covering design, build, and operations as a combined scope had never been awarded to a North American facility before. There was no precedent to follow.
Our role
Design management through third-party certification.
PGCIS led design management and construction management through the full delivery cycle, including owner-furnished contractor-installed equipment procurement and vendor qualification. We managed commissioning from initial prefunctional testing through integrated systems testing, with close attention to the liquid cooling system: the thermal performance of the negative pressure chilled water loop, the dry cooler heat rejection, and how the cooling interface held up under sustained HPC load.
The packaged generator plant with integrated rotary flywheel UPS required a separate commissioning sequence. We verified that the flywheel bridging time was sufficient under HPC load transients and that the generator start sequence performed to spec across the range of Texas ambient conditions.
We coordinated the CEEDA Gold certification process across the design, build, and operations phases. Because no North American facility had gone through this at the Gold level, the process required direct engagement with the certifying body to document how the facility's architecture satisfied the criteria in a configuration they had not previously reviewed.
Outcomes
What happened
- First CEEDA Gold certification in North America for combined design, build, and operations
- DCD "Most Innovative" award, 2014
- Virtually zero water consumption in Austin's climate, as specified
- PUE 1.2 delivered; most efficient HPC facility in Texas at the time
- N+1 concurrently maintainable infrastructure verified through commissioning
- Delivered on a compressed schedule across a distributed, multi-city stakeholder group
What this proves
A design constraint is only real if commissioning validates it.
Zero water consumption in Austin holds up when the dry cooler system sustains thermal performance under HPC load. This one did. PGCIS ran the project from design management through third-party certification, on a tight schedule, across a distributed stakeholder group, on a cooling architecture with no North American reference. The CEEDA Gold and the DCD award say the building was delivered to what it was designed to be.