Designing, Building, and Populating a 10-Megawatt Datacenter

10MW isn't anywhere close to the giant datacenters of Yahoo!, Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, but they usually have large teams of people at multiple locations and often none of them are sysadmins. This talk will give you the system administrator's perspective, since I was heavily involved in many phases of the design, evaluation, and build process. We'll talk about compute density, things that inhibit it, cooling, power and power distribution, machine planning, and supporting large and dynamic HPC clusters. How many kW can you fit in a rack? Just because you can, should you? What sorts of redundancy should you build in? How do you talk to site electricians? We've looked at these questions and more, arriving at some conclusions that could help you.