Glossary

A liquid cooling architecture in which a refrigerant is pumped to cold plates on each processor and partly boils there, then returns as a liquid-vapor mixture to a condenser. It targets chip powers beyond the practical range of single-phase water cooling.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

A power architecture that distributes 800-volt direct current to AI racks instead of AC or 54 V DC, cutting conversion stages, copper and losses at very high rack densities. NVIDIA has published an 800 VDC reference architecture for AI factories.

• Deployment Engineering

A heat exchanger rating method that relates effectiveness (actual over maximum possible heat transfer) to the number of transfer units (NTU) and the heat capacity ratio. It is useful when outlet temperatures are unknown.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

A calculation that predicts material or molecular behavior from the fundamental equations of quantum mechanics, without fitting to experimental data. DFT and Hartree-Fock are common ab initio methods.

• Materials

A test-time search method for LLMs. It builds a tree of attempts and uses Thompson sampling to decide, at each step, whether to refine a promising earlier answer or generate a fresh one.

• Full Lifecycle

An experiment that removes or changes one component of a model or training setup at a time to measure how much that component contributes to the result.

• Full Lifecycle

A B2B marketing approach that targets a defined list of high-value accounts with personalized campaigns, rather than broad lead generation.

• Full Lifecycle

A pressure vessel that stores fluid and absorbs volume changes in a closed loop. In two-phase cooling, an accumulator (often bladder or piston type) also sets system pressure and therefore saturation temperature.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

The American Concrete Institute's Building Code Requirements for Structural Concrete. It governs the design of concrete foundations, slabs and equipment pads.

• Deployment Engineering

A machine learning strategy in which the model chooses which new experiments or labels would be most informative, so fewer costly tests are needed.

• Hardware
• Full Lifecycle

The portion of contracted power that is actually delivered and used by IT load (vs just contracted/available capacity).

• Deployment Engineering

Soldering with an alloy containing active elements, such as titanium, that bond directly to metals, ceramics and oxides without flux.

• Materials
• Hardware

The average yearly revenue from a customer contract, excluding one-off fees.

• Full Lifecycle

Building parts layer by layer from a digital model, in metals, polymers or ceramics. It allows internal channels and manifolds that are hard or impossible to machine.

• Hardware

A dry cooler that pre-cools incoming air by evaporating a small amount of water on pads or through mist, boosting capacity on hot days while using far less water than a cooling tower.

• Deployment Engineering

Adsorption refers to the process in which atoms, ions, or molecules from a gas, liquid, or dissolved solid adhere to a surface, forming a film.

• Materials

A curve showing how much gas a material adsorbs as pressure changes at a fixed temperature. Isotherms are the basic measurement for comparing sorbents and porous materials.

• Materials

A professional association for data center and IT infrastructure professionals, known for the Data Center World conference.

• Deployment Engineering

The software that runs AI agents: it hands them inputs, executes their tool calls, validates and applies their changes, and manages retries and state.

• Full Lifecycle

An isolated computing environment where an AI agent can run code and tools without affecting other users' data or the wider system.

• Full Lifecycle

A group of AI agents that divide a large task between them and coordinate their work, often with one agent supervising or checking the others.

• Full Lifecycle

AI systems designed to act with a degree of autonomy: they break a goal into steps, use tools and data, and carry work forward with limited human prompting.

• Full Lifecycle

The use of AI agents to create, edit or check CAD models, typically by generating code for a CAD kernel or driving CAD software through an API.

• Hardware
• Full Lifecycle

A multi-step process in which AI agents carry out some or all of the steps, such as gathering inputs, running calculations, drafting outputs and checking results, within a defined sequence.

• Full Lifecycle

The organization, office or individual responsible for enforcing code requirements and approving equipment, installations and procedures, typically a local building or fire department.

• Deployment Engineering

The North American trade association that publishes performance-rating standards for HVAC equipment, such as AHRI 550/590 for chillers and AHRI 410 for coils, and runs performance certification programs.

• Deployment Engineering

A central unit containing fans, coils, filters and dampers that conditions and moves air through ductwork to a building or space.

• Deployment Engineering

A software system that uses an AI model to pursue a goal over multiple steps: it plans, calls tools, reads results and decides what to do next, rather than returning a single answer.

• Full Lifecycle

A standard dataset and scoring method used to compare AI models on the same task, such as accuracy on a set of questions or error against reference calculations.

• Materials
• Full Lifecycle

An AI assistant that works alongside a person inside their workflow, suggesting, drafting or checking work while the person stays in control of decisions.

• Full Lifecycle

Structured tests that measure how well an AI model or agent performs a task, using fixed datasets, scoring rubrics or reviewers, so changes can be compared over time.

• Full Lifecycle

NVIDIA's term for a data center purpose-built to produce AI output (tokens) at scale, where power, cooling, networking and compute are designed as one system for training and inference.

• Deployment Engineering
• Full Lifecycle

The use of AI methods, such as machine-learned simulation, generative models and AI agents, to speed up scientific research and discovery.

• Materials
• Full Lifecycle

A software layer that manages AI agents the way a computer operating system manages programs: it schedules their work, gives them tools and data, controls permissions and records what they do.

• Full Lifecycle

Coordinating multiple AI models, agents, tools and data sources so they work together on a larger task, including deciding which component runs when and passing results between them.

• Full Lifecycle

A fixed-term training program that brings people from technical fields into AI research and engineering through hands-on work with an experienced team.

• Full Lifecycle

Molecular dynamics in which the forces on atoms are calculated with a quantum-mechanical method such as DFT at every time step. AIMD is accurate but very expensive, so it is mainly used for small systems and short timescales, and increasingly as training data for MLIPs.

• Materials

The American Institute of Steel Construction Specification for Structural Steel Buildings. It governs the design of steel framing, bracing and supports.

• Deployment Engineering

Amazon SageMaker is Amazon Web Services' (AWS) managed platform for building, training and deploying machine learning models. SageMaker JumpStart is its hub of pre-trained models and solutions that users can deploy in a few steps.

• Full Lifecycle

AMD's data center GPU accelerator generation following the MI300 and MI350 series, aimed at large-scale AI training and inference in liquid-cooled racks.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

The maximum continuous current a conductor can carry without exceeding its temperature rating. Ampacity depends on conductor material, size, insulation, ambient temperature and installation conditions, and is set by tables in the NEC.

• Deployment Engineering

A major customer that commits to leasing a significant portion of data-center capacity, typically with a long-term contract. Anchor tenants provide stable revenue and reduce financial risk for new builds or expansions.

• Deployment Engineering

The US body that accredits standards developers and approves American National Standards across industries. Many electrical, mechanical and drawing standards carry an ANSI designation.

• Deployment Engineering

A commercial CFD solver from Ansys widely used for turbulent, multiphase and boiling flow simulation.

• Hardware

A warning label fixed to electrical equipment that states the calculated incident energy, arc-flash boundary, nominal voltage and required PPE, as required by NFPA 70E and the NEC.

• Deployment Engineering

An engineering analysis that calculates the incident energy an electrical arc could release at each piece of equipment, defines arc-flash boundaries and sets the personal protective equipment workers need. It is usually performed to IEEE 1584 and supports NFPA 70E compliance.

• Deployment Engineering

A US Department of Energy agency that funds high-risk, high-impact energy technology research. Its COOLERCHIPS program targets energy-efficient data center cooling.

• Hardware
• Full Lifecycle

The American Society of Civil Engineers standard that defines minimum design loads for buildings and structures, including dead, live, wind, snow and seismic loads.

• Deployment Engineering

An open-source Python library for setting up, running and analyzing atomistic simulations, with a common interface to many DFT codes and interatomic potentials.

• Materials

The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers. It publishes the thermal, energy and refrigerant-safety standards used across data center mechanical design, including TC 9.9 guidelines, Standard 90.4 and Standard 15.

• Materials
• Deployment Engineering

ASHRAE's Safety Standard for Refrigeration Systems. It sets requirements for the design, construction and installation of refrigeration systems to protect occupants, based on refrigerant safety group and quantity.

• Materials
• Deployment Engineering

ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 90.4, the Energy Standard for Data Centers. It sets minimum energy-efficiency requirements for data center mechanical and electrical systems using design load component metrics.

• Deployment Engineering

ASHRAE TC 9.9 classes that define the facility water supply temperature a liquid-cooled IT system is designed for. Current classes are named by their maximum supply temperature (W17, W27, W32, W40, W45 and W+). Older guidance used W1 to W5.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

The ANSI/ASHRAE standard for designating refrigerants and classifying their safety. It assigns R-numbers and safety groups based on toxicity (A or B) and flammability (1, 2L, 2 or 3).

• Materials
• Deployment Engineering

The ASHRAE technical committee for mission-critical facilities and IT equipment. Its Thermal Guidelines for Data Processing Environments define the recommended and allowable air temperature and humidity ranges for IT equipment, plus liquid-cooling classes.

• Deployment Engineering

Cryptocurrency mining using application-specific integrated circuits, typically in air-cooled halls with constant load and low redundancy.

• Deployment Engineering

The ASME family of codes for pressure piping design, including B31.1 (power piping) and B31.5 (refrigeration piping and heat transfer components). They set rules for materials, wall thickness, joints and testing.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

The EU framework (Directives 2014/34/EU and 1999/92/EC) for equipment and workplaces in potentially explosive atmospheres. ATEX-rated devices are certified safe for use in specific hazardous zones.

• Hardware

The average time a gas remains in the atmosphere before it is removed by chemical reactions or deposition. Short lifetimes usually mean lower GWP.

• Materials

Computer simulation that models a material or molecule atom by atom, to predict its structure, energy, dynamics and properties. Methods range from quantum mechanics (DFT) to classical force fields and machine-learned potentials.

• Materials

A switch that automatically transfers a load from its normal source to a backup source, such as a generator, when it detects a power failure, and back again when normal power returns.

• Deployment Engineering

A time-ordered record of who or what did each action in a system, when, and with what inputs, kept so work can be reviewed or verified later.

• Full Lifecycle

The maximum short-circuit current the utility or other source can deliver at a point in the system, usually stated by the utility at the service entrance. It is the starting point for short-circuit and arc-flash studies.

• Deployment Engineering

AWS Trainium, Amazon Web Services’ custom silicon chips designed specifically for training large artificial intelligence models efficiently.

• Full Lifecycle

A refrigerant mixture that boils at a single temperature and keeps the same composition in liquid and vapor, so it behaves like a pure fluid. ASHRAE designates azeotropes with R-5xx numbers.

• Materials
• Hardware

A valve that holds a set pressure upstream of itself by opening as upstream pressure rises. It is used to fix operating pressure in test loops.

• Hardware

A chip package with no lid, where the cold plate or TIM contacts the silicon die directly. Bare-die cooling removes one interface layer but needs tighter control of flatness and mounting force.

• Hardware

Sensors that detect gases released by lithium-ion cells in the early stages of failure, giving warning before thermal runaway so the system can isolate the battery.

• Deployment Engineering

Electricity generated and used on the customer's side of the utility meter, for example on-site gas turbines, engines, solar or storage, rather than taken from the grid.

• Deployment Engineering

A system of batteries, power conversion and controls that stores electrical energy and releases it on demand. At data centers it can provide backup, peak shaving, grid services or smoothing of AI load swings.

• Deployment Engineering

The specific surface area of a porous material, calculated with the Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) method from nitrogen or argon adsorption isotherms. It is a standard metric for sorbents, catalysts and MOFs.

• Materials

The energy released when a guest molecule sits inside a host structure, such as an OSDA inside a zeolite or CO2 inside a MOF. It is used to rank how well guests fit a host.

• Materials

Materials produced by living organisms or derived from biological sources, such as cellulose, chitin, lignin and biochar. They are studied as renewable, lower-carbon alternatives to synthetic materials, including as sorbents for carbon capture.

• Materials

A connection that engages automatically when a server or tray slides into a rack, without the technician seeing or handling the connector. Blind-mate liquid couplings allow tool-free server swaps in liquid-cooled racks.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

The final thickness of a thermal interface material layer after assembly. Thinner, uniform bond lines give lower thermal resistance, so BLT is controlled with clamping force, spacers or fillers.

• Hardware

A document that records the design criteria, assumptions, codes, loads, redundancy targets and system concepts a design is built on. It is the reference engineers check every later design decision against.

• Deployment Engineering

A dimensionless ratio of heat flux to the product of mass flux and latent heat. Flow boiling correlations such as Kandlikar's use it, together with the convection number, to weigh nucleate against convective boiling.

• Hardware

The structured list of every part, sub-assembly and quantity needed to build a product. Engineering BOMs are linked to part numbers and revisions.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

A dimensionless ratio of gravitational to surface tension forces. In two-phase flow it indicates whether channel size is small enough for surface tension to dominate over gravity.

• Hardware

A compact heat exchanger made of stacked corrugated metal plates brazed together, with alternating channels for two fluids. BPHEs are widely used as condensers and liquid-to-liquid exchangers.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

Joining metal parts by melting a filler alloy into the joint at temperatures above 450 °C but below the base metals' melting points. Vacuum brazing is common for copper cold plates and plate heat exchangers.

• Materials
• Hardware

A database of circuit breaker models with their ratings, trip curves and settings, used by power-system software for coordination and arc-flash calculations.

• Deployment Engineering

A site with existing buildings or infrastructure that is redeveloped or retrofitted, as opposed to a new greenfield build.

• Deployment Engineering

A development model where a developer builds a facility to one tenant's exact specifications and leases it to them long term, usually 15 years or more.

• Deployment Engineering

The size a vapor bubble reaches before it detaches from a heated surface. It is a key input to mechanistic wall-boiling models and depends on the fluid, surface and flow conditions.

• Materials
• Hardware

A prefabricated, enclosed busbar system that distributes power along its length. Plug-in tap boxes connect racks or equipment at any point, which makes changes faster than running new cable.

• Deployment Engineering

A profile of a type of person involved in a purchase decision, describing their role, goals, fears and what they need from a vendor.

• Full Lifecycle

The process of selecting conductor size and number of parallel sets for each circuit so that it meets ampacity, voltage-drop and short-circuit withstand requirements. It is also called conductor or feeder sizing.

• Deployment Engineering

An open-source Python library for building parametric 3D CAD models in code, on top of the OpenCascade kernel. Scripts can export STEP and STL files.

• Hardware
• Full Lifecycle

Software that turns a CAD model into machine toolpaths and G-code, choosing tools, feeds, speeds and cutting strategies.

• Hardware

A quality-management process that investigates the root cause of a non-conformance, fixes it (corrective action) and changes processes to stop similar issues recurring (preventive action).

• Hardware
• Full Lifecycle

Money a company spends to buy, build or upgrade long-term physical assets, such as buildings, equipment or data center infrastructure. CapEx is recorded on the balance sheet and depreciated over the asset's life, unlike operating expenses (OpEx).

• Full Lifecycle

The length scale below which surface tension forces dominate over gravity for a given liquid, equal to the square root of surface tension divided by gravity times the liquid-vapor density difference.

• Materials
• Hardware

Liquid transport through a porous or microstructured surface driven by surface tension. Wick structures resupply liquid to hot spots and can delay dryout and raise CHF.

• Materials
• Hardware

Automatically tracing a changed requirement or input through every calculation, document and design that depends on it, then updating or flagging each affected item.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering
• Full Lifecycle

A go-to-market strategy where a company names and defines a new market category, then positions itself as the reference company in it.

• Full Lifecycle

The formation and collapse of vapor bubbles in a liquid where local pressure drops below vapor pressure. It damages pumps and valves and causes noise and flow loss.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

A formal review held when a design is mature enough to freeze, confirming it meets requirements and is ready for fabrication and test. It usually follows a preliminary design review (PDR).

• Hardware

Conformité Européenne (European Conformity). European conformity marking indicating that electrical products and equipment meet EU safety, health, and environmental requirements. Required for datacentre power equipment in EMEA regions.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

A procurement model where the contractor buys and installs all equipment and materials, giving the owner a single point of responsibility.

• Deployment Engineering

Numerical simulation of fluid flow, heat transfer and related physics by solving the governing equations on a computational mesh.

• Hardware
• Full Lifecycle

A person inside a customer organization who actively advocates for a vendor's product and helps move the deal through internal approval.

• Full Lifecycle

An early flow boiling correlation (Chen, 1966) that splits the heat transfer coefficient into a forced-convection term and a nucleate boiling term with enhancement and suppression factors.

• Hardware

The maximum heat flux a boiling surface can sustain before vapor blankets the surface and heat transfer collapses. Exceeding CHF causes a sharp jump in surface temperature, so it sets the upper safe operating limit for any boiling-based cooling device.

• Hardware

The central system of chillers, pumps, cooling towers or dry coolers, piping and controls that produces chilled water for a facility.

• Deployment Engineering

The person designated under the OSHA Laboratory Standard to develop and implement a lab's Chemical Hygiene Plan.

• Materials

A flow condition in which the velocity of a compressible or flashing two-phase fluid reaches a critical limit, so lowering downstream pressure no longer increases the flow rate. It limits the capacity of vapor return lines, valves and orifices.

• Hardware

A simulation approach that solves heat conduction in solids and convection in fluids together, coupled at their shared surfaces. It is the standard way to model a cold plate and chip as one system.

• Hardware
• Full Lifecycle

An explicit friction factor equation (Churchill, 1977) valid across laminar, transitional and turbulent pipe flow, often used instead of reading a Moody chart.

• Hardware

The standard text file format for storing crystal structures, including unit cell, symmetry and atomic positions.

• Materials

The load applied to press a cold plate or heat sink onto a chip package. It controls TIM bond line thickness and contact resistance and must stay within the chip vendor's allowed limits.

• Hardware

A process that separates oxygen from air using a metal oxide that absorbs oxygen in one step and releases it in another, as a lower-energy alternative to cryogenic air separation.

• Materials

A fire suppression system that discharges an electrically non-conductive gas that leaves no residue, such as inert gas blends (IG-55, IG-541) or chemical agents (FK-5-1-12, HFC-227ea). It is used to protect electrical and IT rooms.

• Deployment Engineering

Cold plate design with a solid interface (plate) between coolant and chip. The liquid flows through internal passages (e.g., channels or jets) but does not directly touch the chip.

• Hardware

A precision inspection machine that measures the geometry of a part with a probe or optical sensor to check dimensions, flatness and positions against the drawing.

• Hardware

Computer numerical control machining, in which programmed machine tools such as mills and lathes cut parts from solid stock. It is the main process for prototype and many production cold plates.

• Hardware

An engagement model where a vendor's AI team works alongside a client's engineers to build custom AI applications around the client's own workflows, rather than selling off-the-shelf software or outsourced design.

• Deployment Engineering
• Full Lifecycle

An agent design pattern where the AI model writes a short program that calls tools in a loop, instead of calling each tool one at a time and reading every result back into its context.

• Full Lifecycle

The cover of a cold plate that seals the coolant chamber and usually carries the inlet, outlet and any jet or flow-distribution features. Lid stiffness affects sealing, clamping force and repeatability.

• Hardware

A bare building structure with no power, mechanical systems or conditioning, leaving all fit-out to the tenant. It is the cheapest starting point but needs the longest fit-out.

• Deployment Engineering

A data center business model in which customers rent space, power, cooling and network connectivity in a facility owned and run by a provider, instead of building their own. Customers install and manage their own IT equipment.

• Deployment Engineering

The five-stage data center commissioning process: L1 factory witness testing, L2 site delivery and installation checks, L3 equipment startup, L4 functional performance testing and L5 integrated systems testing.

• Deployment Engineering

A server sled in a rack-scale AI system that carries GPUs, CPUs, network cards and power components, with cold plates and manifolds for liquid cooling. Several compute trays share one rack manifold and CDU.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

The ability to take any single component or distribution path out of service for planned maintenance without shutting down the IT load. It is the defining requirement of an Uptime Institute Tier III data center.

• Deployment Engineering

The heat exchanger that removes heat from refrigerant vapor so it returns to liquid. In a pumped two-phase cooling loop, the condenser rejects chip heat to facility water or air.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

One of the three-dimensional shapes a flexible molecule can adopt by rotating around single bonds. Conformer generation produces a set of plausible 3D geometries, which are then ranked by energy.

• Materials

The sum of the nameplate ratings of all equipment connected to a system, before demand or diversity factors are applied.

• Deployment Engineering

Two ways an MLIP can output forces. A conservative model predicts energy and takes its gradient to get forces, which guarantees energy conservation in MD. A direct model predicts forces as a separate output, which is faster but can cause energy drift in long simulations.

• Materials

Contact angle is the angle a liquid droplet makes with a solid surface; wettability describes how readily the liquid spreads. Highly wetting coolants and surfaces affect boiling onset, CHF and wick performance.

• Materials
• Hardware

A data center module built inside an ISO-style or custom enclosure that provides its own weather protection, environmental control and security, so it can be placed outdoors or where the host building cannot control humidity or dust.

• Deployment Engineering

A connected, continuously updated map of an organization's information (requirements, experiments, designs, suppliers, documents and decisions) stored as linked records that AI agents and people can query and update.

• Full Lifecycle

The amount of text, measured in tokens, that an AI model can consider at once, including instructions, conversation history, documents and tool results.

• Full Lifecycle

The amount of power/energy capacity the customer has secured (e.g., via utility or landlord), whether or not they are yet using it.

• Deployment Engineering

The calculation of the heat a cooling system must remove, including IT load, electrical losses, envelope and ventilation, used to size cooling equipment.

• Deployment Engineering

A heat rejection device that cools water by evaporating part of it into the air stream. It is efficient but consumes significant water.

• Deployment Engineering

An open-source library of thermophysical properties for pure fluids and mixtures, often used as a free alternative to REFPROP in engineering calculations.

• Materials
• Hardware

A flow meter that measures mass flow directly from the twisting of a vibrating tube as fluid passes through it. It also reports density, which makes it useful for two-phase and refrigerant loops.

• Hardware

A data center air-cooling unit that uses fans and a chilled-water coil to cool and circulate air. Unlike a CRAC, it has no built-in compressor and relies on a central chiller plant.

• Deployment Engineering

The power drawn by the IT equipment a data center must keep running, such as servers, storage and network gear, excluding cooling and other facility loads.

• Deployment Engineering

The temperature and pressure above which a substance can no longer exist as separate liquid and vapor phases. They bound the usable range of a phase-change cooling cycle.

• Materials
• Hardware

Repurposing a cryptocurrency mining site, which already has large power connections and land, into an AI or high-performance computing data center. It usually needs new cooling, electrical redundancy and networking.

• Deployment Engineering

A Green Grid metric equal to the total CO₂ emissions from a data center's energy use divided by IT equipment energy. It depends on grid carbon intensity and PUE.

• Deployment Engineering

An AI operating system for science and engineering. It runs AI agents on a shared context graph of an organization's data, so research, design and engineering workflows can be automated, checked and traced in one place.

• Full Lifecycle

The CurieOS offering for engineering firms: AI workflows that help engineers review, draft and deliver project documents faster, with every deliverable approved by a named engineer.

• Deployment Engineering
• Full Lifecycle

The CurieOS offering for research teams: AI agents, atomistic simulation and a governed context graph applied to materials discovery, chemistry and formulations.

• Materials
• Full Lifecycle

The three disciplines CurieOS connects: Materials (discovery and selection), Hardware (product development) and Deployment (engineering and delivery).

• Full Lifecycle

A valve or fitting rating equal to the flow of water in US gallons per minute that passes with a 1 psi pressure drop. Higher Cv means lower flow resistance.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

Direct Air Capture (DAC) removes carbon dioxide (CO₂) directly from ambient air using engineered sorbents and thermal regeneration processes.

• Materials

A graph whose edges have a direction and contain no loops. Workflow engines use DAGs to represent tasks and their dependencies so each step runs only after its inputs are ready.

• Full Lifecycle

Facility housing racks of servers and accelerators (e.g., Nvidia GPUs) that require intensive cooling due to high power density.

• Deployment Engineering

The policies and controls that set who can access data, how it is used, how long it is kept and whether it can be used to train AI models.

• Full Lifecycle

A large room/space within a data center where IT racks and associated cooling infrastructure are deployed.

• Deployment Engineering

A record of where a piece of data came from and how it was created or changed, including its sources, inputs, processing steps and authors.

• Full Lifecycle

The requirement that data is stored and processed in a specific country or region, often for legal, regulatory or contractual reasons.

• Full Lifecycle

Information held by one team, tool or system that others cannot easily see or use, which causes rework and errors at handoffs.

• Full Lifecycle

Software that monitors and manages a data center's physical infrastructure, including power, cooling, space and assets, often integrating with BMS and EPMS.

• Deployment Engineering

A written matrix that assigns each scope item on a project, such as design, supply, installation and commissioning, to a specific party. It prevents gaps and disputes between partners.

• Deployment Engineering

The temperature difference between supply and return in a cooling loop or between inlet and outlet air. It sets how much flow is needed to move a given amount of heat.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

The ratio of the maximum demand of a system or load to its total connected load. Engineers apply demand factors so services and feeders are not oversized for loads that never run at full rating together.

• Deployment Engineering

The physical point where ownership and maintenance responsibility for infrastructure passes from one party to another, such as from a utility or telecom carrier to a customer, or from an equipment supplier to a data center operator. Each party is responsible for everything on its side of the demarc.

• Deployment Engineering

The difference between the power a data center operator has contracted and the power that is energized and serving IT load. It reflects construction, equipment and power-delivery delays rather than lack of demand.

• Deployment Engineering

How enterprise software is hosted: as a vendor-hosted service (SaaS), in the customer's own cloud account (private cloud or VPC), or on the customer's own hardware (on-premises).

• Full Lifecycle

The formal step that approves a design, drawing or part revision for procurement and manufacture. It freezes the configuration and puts it under change control.

• Hardware

The full set of design variables and allowed ranges that an engineering or optimization process can explore.

• Hardware
• Full Lifecycle

The ability to link every design decision, value and change back to the requirement, input, code clause or assumption that drove it, and forward to everything it affects.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering
• Full Lifecycle

The loop of designing a part, fabricating it, testing it and feeding the results into the next design. Its duration sets how many improvement passes a hardware program gets before targets move.

• Hardware
• Full Lifecycle

A calculation that always returns the same output for the same inputs because it runs as defined code or rules, rather than depending on a probabilistic AI model.

• Full Lifecycle

A check that every protective and switching device (breakers, fuses, switchgear) has an interrupting and withstand rating at least equal to the fault current available at its location. It is normally run alongside the short-circuit study.

• Deployment Engineering

Designing parts so they are easy and economical to make with the chosen process, for example by respecting tool sizes, tolerances and material limits. Good DFM cuts cost, lead time and scrap.

• Hardware
• Full Lifecycle

A quantum-mechanical method that calculates the electronic structure and energy of atoms, molecules and solids from first principles. DFT is the standard reference method in computational chemistry and materials science, but its cost grows steeply with system size, which typically limits it to a few hundred atoms.

• Materials

A metal-organic framework whose metal sites are functionalized with diamine molecules. The amines react cooperatively with CO2, giving sharp, step-shaped adsorption that suits low-energy CO2 capture.

• Materials

A measure of how much a material reduces an electric field compared with a vacuum (relative permittivity). In cooling fluids, a low dielectric constant limits signal interference and electrical losses near electronics.

• Materials
• Hardware

An electrically insulating liquid that can touch live electronics without causing short circuits. Dielectric fluids are used in immersion cooling, two-phase direct-to-chip cooling and transformers.

• Materials
• Hardware

The maximum electric field or voltage an insulating material can withstand before it breaks down and conducts. For cooling fluids it indicates how safe the fluid is around energized electronics.

• Materials
• Hardware

A solid-state joining process that presses clean metal surfaces together at high temperature until atoms diffuse across the interface, forming a joint with no filler.

• Hardware

A generative model that learns to reverse a gradual noising process. It starts from random noise and removes it step by step to produce new samples such as images, molecules or crystal structures.

• Materials
• Full Lifecycle

A virtual model of a physical asset, process or system that is kept in step with real-world data, so it can be used to monitor, simulate and test changes before making them.

• Hardware
• Full Lifecycle

A liquid cooling approach that delivers coolant directly to processors (CPUs/GPUs), enabling high-density, energy-efficient compute.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

A documented plan for restoring IT systems after an outage, cyberattack or data loss. It sets a Recovery Time Objective (RTO), the maximum acceptable downtime, and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO), the maximum acceptable data loss, for each critical system. A Business Impact Analysis (BIA) ranks which systems matter most.

• Full Lifecycle

The ratio of the sum of individual maximum demands of loads to the maximum demand of the whole system. It reflects that different loads peak at different times.

• Deployment Engineering

An umbrella term, used by OCP and ASHRAE, for cooling in which liquid is brought to cold plates in direct thermal contact with components. It covers both single-phase and two-phase direct-to-chip systems.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

A laser powder bed fusion process that builds metal parts by selectively melting thin layers of metal powder with a laser.

• Hardware

All the people in a customer organization who influence or approve a purchase, also called the buying group or buying committee.

• Full Lifecycle

A system that conditions outdoor air separately from the main cooling system, typically to control humidity and pressurize a space.

• Deployment Engineering

Statistical method for planning experiments by systematically exploring parameter space, rather than sequential "one-off" experiments.

• Materials

The organized collection of drawing sheets for a project, grouped by discipline (for example E for electrical, M for mechanical) with a common title block and revision history.

• Deployment Engineering

A semiconductor fabrication process that etches deep, high-aspect-ratio features into silicon. It is used to make MEMS devices and silicon microchannel coolers.

• Hardware

A closed-circuit heat exchanger that rejects heat from a fluid loop to outside air using fans, with no water evaporation. It enables free cooling when outdoor air is cool enough.

• Deployment Engineering

A transformer cooled by air rather than oil, often with cast-resin (cast-coil) windings. It suits indoor installation and lower fire risk.

• Deployment Engineering

The loss of the liquid film on a heated channel wall in flow boiling, usually at high vapor quality. After dryout the wall is cooled by vapor, the heat transfer coefficient drops sharply and component temperature rises.

• Hardware

A thermal analysis technique that measures heat flow into or out of a sample as temperature changes, revealing melting, crystallization and glass transitions.

• Materials

A cooling method where refrigerant evaporates directly in the air coil to cool air, as in CRAC units and packaged air conditioners, rather than cooling water first.

• Deployment Engineering

An Autodesk file format for exchanging 2D and 3D CAD drawing data between programs.

• Deployment Engineering

Professional liability for mistakes or omissions in design work, typically covered by professional indemnity insurance. It is the main risk carried by engineering consultancies, as distinct from construction risk.

• Deployment Engineering
• Full Lifecycle

Commercial electrical power-system design and analysis software used for one-lines, short-circuit, coordination and arc-flash studies.

• Deployment Engineering

A room-temperature metal printing process that deposits metal, such as copper, from an electrolyte onto a substrate, voxel by voxel. It can form very fine features without thermal stress.

• Hardware

The EU agency that runs the REACH and CLP chemical regulations. Its scientific committees, RAC (Risk Assessment) and SEAC (Socio-Economic Analysis), give opinions on proposed restrictions.

• Materials

The BASF business that develops emissions catalysts and precious-metal products, including catalytic converters for vehicles.

• Materials
• Full Lifecycle

A formal document that authorizes a change to a released design, drawing or BOM. It records the reason, affected parts and implementation plan.

• Hardware

A smaller data center placed close to users or data sources to cut latency, often modular and a few megawatts or less.

• Deployment Engineering

The conductor that bonds non-current-carrying metal parts of equipment to the grounding system, giving fault current a low-impedance path back to the source so protective devices trip. Minimum sizes are set by NEC Table 250.122.

• Deployment Engineering

The calculation of the total electrical demand a building or system will place on its power supply, built up from connected loads and adjusted with demand and diversity factors. It sets the size of services, feeders, transformers and backup power.

• Deployment Engineering

A list of numbers that represents the meaning of a piece of data, such as text, a molecule or a crystal structure, so similar items sit close together and can be searched or compared.

• Materials
• Full Lifecycle

The total greenhouse gas emissions from producing a material or product, including raw material extraction, manufacturing and transport, usually expressed in kilograms of CO2-equivalent (kgCO2e). It is distinct from operational carbon, the emissions from using or running the product.

• Materials
• Deployment Engineering

A catalyst in a vehicle exhaust system that converts harmful gases, such as carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides, into less harmful ones. Examples include three-way catalysts and selective catalytic reduction (SCR) systems.

• Materials

Data center emulators are tools or physical hardware used to replicate the thermal, power, and networking conditions of a data center environment to test infrastructure before installing IT equipment. They range from physical rack-mounted heat load banks (2kW–4kW) to digital twin software, enabling safe, efficient testing of cooling, airflow, and power capacity.

• Deployment Engineering
• Hardware

The organization that ultimately consumes the compute services delivered from a data center (e.g., an AI lab, hyperscaler/cloud provider, enterprise, or government agency). In colocation and developer-led builds, the end user may not own or operate the facility but drives requirements like power density, uptime/SLA, security, and delivery timeline.

• Deployment Engineering

The point at which electrical equipment or a facility is first connected to a live power source.

• Deployment Engineering

A slow, unphysical change in the total energy of a molecular dynamics simulation that should conserve energy. Drift signals numerical or model errors and makes long simulations unreliable.

• Materials

An open-source building energy simulation engine funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE). It models heating, cooling, lighting and plug loads over time.

• Deployment Engineering
• Full Lifecycle

A heat transfer surface modified to boil more efficiently, using features such as porous coatings, metal foams, micropillars, fins or controlled roughness. Enhancements raise HTC and CHF compared with a smooth surface.

• Materials
• Hardware

How a molecule decomposes in the environment and whether it forms persistent or harmful products (e.g., specific acids).

• Materials

A mathematical relation between pressure, temperature, volume and composition of a fluid, used to calculate phase behavior and thermodynamic properties.

• Materials
• Hardware

The part of the US Clean Air Act, administered by the EPA, that regulates refrigerant handling. It covers technician certification, leak repair and refrigerant recovery.

• Materials
• Hardware

A project delivery model where a firm provides engineering design, manages procurement and manages construction on the owner's behalf, while the owner holds the construction contracts. Unlike EPC, the EPCM provider does not carry lump-sum construction risk.

• Deployment Engineering

A synthetic rubber widely used for seals, O-rings and hoses in water and water-glycol cooling systems. It has poor resistance to many oils and some refrigerants.

• Materials
• Hardware

A control that shuts down power to electronic equipment in a room or module in an emergency, required by some codes for IT spaces.

• Deployment Engineering

A table in a design package that lists each major piece of equipment with its tag, capacity, electrical data, manufacturer basis and location, for example AHU, CRAH, chiller or pump schedules.

• Deployment Engineering

Selecting the rating of major equipment, such as transformers, switchgear, UPS, generators, chillers or air handlers, so it meets the design load with the required margin and redundancy.

• Deployment Engineering

A neural network whose outputs transform correctly when the input is rotated, translated or reflected, for example forces that rotate with the molecule. Equivariance builds physical symmetry into models of atoms.

• Materials

The operator of most of the Texas power grid and its wholesale market. ERCOT's market structure lets large users negotiate bespoke supply or co-locate with on-site generation.

• Deployment Engineering

A Green Grid metric that credits a data center for energy it exports for reuse, such as waste heat, by subtracting reused energy from total facility energy before dividing by IT energy.

• Deployment Engineering

Commercial power-system analysis software widely used for load flow, short-circuit, protective coordination and arc-flash studies.

• Deployment Engineering

The European Union directive that sets energy-efficiency targets and, since its 2023 recast, requires data centers above 500 kW to report energy performance data such as PUE, water use and waste heat reuse.

• Deployment Engineering

A proposal under the EU REACH regulation to restrict the manufacture, sale and use of the whole PFAS class, more than 10,000 substances, rather than individual chemicals. It is being assessed by the European Chemicals Agency's RAC and SEAC committees before a European Commission decision.

• Materials

A CFD approach that treats liquid and vapor as interpenetrating continua, each with its own conservation equations, linked by interphase exchange terms. It is the usual basis for wall-boiling models.

• Hardware

Cooling method where water is sprayed and allowed to evaporate into the air; uses large volumes of water that typically are not recovered.

• Deployment Engineering

The heat exchanger in a refrigeration or two-phase loop where liquid refrigerant absorbs heat and boils. In two-phase direct-to-chip cooling, the cold plate is the evaporator.

• Hardware

The three standard hardware validation stages: EVT proves the engineering concept works, DVT proves the full design meets specification, and PVT proves the production line can build it at quality and rate.

• Hardware

An Incoterms rule where the seller makes goods available at its own premises and the buyer takes on all transport, export clearance, cost and risk from that point.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

The EU regulation that controls fluorinated greenhouse gases, including HFCs, through quotas, product bans and GWP limits. The 2024 revision (Regulation (EU) 2024/573) tightens the phase-down.

• Materials

The central controller of a fire alarm system that monitors detectors and initiating devices and activates alarms, notifications and suppression releases.

• Deployment Engineering

Large vertical assemblies of fans used to move and manage air for cooling within the MDC's air-cooling module.

• Deployment Engineering

Testing of equipment or a prefabricated module at the manufacturer's factory, witnessed by the customer, to prove it meets specification before shipment.

• Deployment Engineering

The ability of a system to keep operating through any single unplanned equipment failure or event without affecting the critical load. In data centers it usually requires 2N distribution with physically separate, simultaneously active paths, as in Uptime Tier IV.

• Deployment Engineering

An Incoterms rule where the seller hands export-cleared goods to the buyer's nominated carrier at a named place. Risk passes to the buyer at that handover.

• Deployment Engineering

Authorization from the US Federal Communications Commission showing that an electronic device's radio-frequency emissions stay within legal limits (electromagnetic compatibility, EMC).

• Hardware

An engineer from a software vendor who works embedded with a customer's team to configure, extend and deploy the product on the customer's real workflows.

• Full Lifecycle

Numerical simulation that divides a structure into small elements to predict stress, deformation, vibration or heat conduction.

• Hardware

A table in an electrical drawing set that lists each feeder with its origin, destination, conductor size, conduit, protective device and length.

• Deployment Engineering

The US agency that regulates interstate electricity transmission and wholesale markets, including the rules RTOs and ISOs use to process grid interconnection requests.

• Deployment Engineering

A fully fluorinated elastomer with the broadest chemical and temperature resistance of common seal materials, at much higher cost than FKM.

• Materials
• Hardware

Boiling regime where a continuous vapor layer forms between the hot surface and the liquid. This vapor film insulates the surface and dramatically reduces heat transfer performance.

• Hardware
• Materials

The ratio of the heat a real fin transfers to the heat it would transfer if its entire surface were at the base temperature. Tall, thin or low-conductivity fins have lower efficiency.

• Hardware

A plumbing design unit that represents the relative water demand or drainage load of a fixture. Summing fixture units sizes water supply and drain piping.

• Deployment Engineering

A family of fluorocarbon rubbers, often known by the trade name Viton, with good resistance to heat, oils and many chemicals. It is a common O-ring material for refrigerant service.

• Materials
• Hardware

A geometric tolerance that limits how far a surface may deviate from a perfect plane. Cold plate base flatness directly affects TIM thickness and thermal resistance.

• Hardware

The maximum weight per unit area a floor or slab can safely support, usually in lb/ft² or kN/m². Liquid-cooled AI racks are much heavier than traditional racks.

• Deployment Engineering

Floating Point Operations Per Second (FLOPS), a standard measure of computing performance used to describe AI training and simulation workloads.

• Full Lifecycle

Boiling that occurs while a liquid is pumped through a heated channel, so heat transfer combines bubble nucleation with forced convection. It is the operating mode of pumped two-phase cold plates and evaporators.

• Hardware

Uneven division of coolant flow among parallel channels, cold plates or servers. In two-phase systems, maldistribution can starve high-power components of liquid and trigger dryout.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

A fully fluorinated ketone (sold as 3M Novec 649) used as a dielectric heat transfer fluid and fire suppressant. It boils at about 49 °C and has very low GWP but is a PFAS substance.

• Materials
• Hardware

FMEA is a systematic method for listing the ways a product or process can fail, their effects and causes. Each failure mode is ranked by severity, occurrence and detection. Design FMEA (DFMEA) applies the method to a product design before release.

• Hardware

An Incoterms rule for sea and inland waterway transport. The seller delivers goods on board the vessel at the named port, and risk passes to the buyer at that point. In US domestic trade, 'FOB origin' or 'FOB destination' marks where title and risk transfer.

• Deployment Engineering

A mathematical function that estimates the potential energy of a system of atoms from their positions, using simple terms for bond stretching, angle bending and non-bonded interactions. Classical force fields such as UFF or Dreiding are fast but cannot describe bond breaking or electronic effects.

• Materials

A specific mixture of ingredients in set proportions designed to deliver a product's performance, such as a coating, lubricant, coolant blend or catalyst washcoat.

• Materials

The ratio of a design's capacity (such as burst pressure or CHF) to the expected operating load. It covers uncertainty in loads, materials and models.

• Hardware

Using cool outdoor air or water to reject heat without running compressors, also called economization. Warm-water liquid cooling extends the hours when free cooling is possible.

• Deployment Engineering

A solid-state welding process in which a rotating tool plasticizes and stirs the joint line without melting the metal. It is common for sealing aluminum and copper cold plates.

• Hardware

An empirical correlation (Friedel, 1979) for frictional pressure drop in two-phase pipe flow, based on a large database of air-water and refrigerant data.

• Hardware

The most capable general-purpose AI models available at a given time, typically developed by a small number of large AI labs.

• Full Lifecycle

A technique that measures which infrared wavelengths a sample absorbs, identifying chemical bonds and functional groups.

• Materials

The complete path of a physical product from discovering its materials, through designing the hardware, to engineering and deploying it in the field.

• Full Lifecycle

A chemical fume hood is a ventilated enclosure that captures and exhausts hazardous vapors, gases and dust away from the user. LEV is the wider class of engineering controls that remove contaminants at their source.

• Materials

The primary facility-side water loop that takes heat from CDUs to the heat rejection plant, such as chillers or dry coolers. It is separated from the TCS by the CDU's heat exchanger.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

Corrosion that occurs when two dissimilar metals are electrically connected in the presence of an electrolyte, causing the less noble metal to corrode faster.

• Materials
• Hardware

An analytical method that separates a mixture's components by gas chromatography and identifies each one by its mass spectrum. It is standard for checking the purity and identity of volatile compounds.

• Materials

A simulation method that predicts how many gas molecules a porous material adsorbs at a given temperature and pressure by randomly inserting, deleting and moving molecules. It is the standard way to compute adsorption isotherms.

• Materials

A standardized symbolic language (ASME Y14.5, ISO 1101) for specifying allowed variation in the form, orientation and position of part features on engineering drawings.

• Hardware

The EU and UK data-protection law that governs how organizations collect, store and process personal data. It covers consent, data-subject rights, breach reporting and cross-border transfers.

• Full Lifecycle

A calculation that adjusts atomic positions, and for crystals the unit cell, until the forces on the atoms are close to zero and the structure sits at an energy minimum. It is usually the first step before computing other properties.

• Materials

The UN system for classifying chemical hazards and communicating them through standard labels, pictograms, signal words and safety data sheets.

• Materials

The temperature at which an amorphous polymer changes from a hard, glassy state to a softer, rubbery state. Tg sets the usable temperature range of plastics, coatings and resins.

• Materials
• Hardware

A neural network that operates on graphs of nodes and edges. In chemistry, atoms are nodes and bonds or neighbor distances are edges, which makes GNNs a natural fit for predicting molecular and material properties.

• Materials
• Full Lifecycle

A processor built for highly parallel computation, originally for rendering graphics and now the main hardware for training and running AI models. Data center GPUs can draw 1,000 W or more each, which is driving the shift to liquid cooling.

• Full Lifecycle

An open-source extension of the PySCF quantum chemistry package that runs Hartree-Fock and DFT calculations on NVIDIA GPUs.

• Materials

A data center built on undeveloped land with no existing buildings or utility infrastructure. Greenfield projects need new power, water and fiber connections, and give designers full freedom over layout. The opposite is a brownfield site, which reuses an existing building or campus.

• Deployment Engineering

The list of generation and large-load projects waiting for a grid operator or utility to study and approve their connection. Long queues are now a major constraint on new data center capacity.

• Deployment Engineering

A surface treatment that propels abrasive particles at a part to clean it and create a controlled roughness.

• Hardware

The degree to which an AI model's answer is supported by the source documents it was given. Grounding benchmarks such as RAGTruth and FACTS Grounding measure how often a model makes claims the sources do not support.

• Full Lifecycle

The system of conductors and electrodes that connects electrical equipment and structures to earth and to each other. It limits touch voltages, stabilizes system voltage and lets protective devices clear ground faults.

• Deployment Engineering

A reinforcement learning algorithm for LLMs. It samples a group of answers to the same prompt and scores each one against the group average, so no separate value model is needed.

• Full Lifecycle

A layout where the hot exhaust aisle between rows of racks is enclosed, so hot air returns to the cooling units without mixing with cold supply air. It raises cooling efficiency and capacity.

• Deployment Engineering

When an AI model produces information that sounds plausible but is false or unsupported by its sources.

• Full Lifecycle

A ruggedized, self-contained data center module engineered for outdoor installation on a pad, with its own enclosure, environmental control and fire protection.

• Deployment Engineering

Currents or voltages at whole-number multiples of the fundamental frequency, caused by non-linear loads such as UPS rectifiers, drives and server power supplies. High harmonic levels overheat equipment and distort voltage, so designs assess them against IEEE 519.

• Deployment Engineering

A structured, team-based review of a process design, usually based on its P&ID. It applies guide words such as 'more flow', 'no flow' or 'reverse flow' to each node to find hazards and operability problems.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

Stacked DRAM packaged next to the GPU die on a shared substrate to deliver very high memory bandwidth. HBM stacks add heat near the GPU and have their own temperature limits.

• Hardware

An olefin refrigerant that contains chlorine as well as hydrogen, fluorine and carbon, such as R-1233zd(E). HCFOs have very low GWP and near-zero ozone depletion potential.

• Materials

Heat flow per unit area, usually in W/cm² for electronics. Chip heat flux, not just total power, determines how hard a cold plate must work because heat is concentrated on the die.

• Hardware

The heat released when a gas adsorbs on a material. It indicates how strongly the gas binds, and how much energy is needed to regenerate the sorbent.

• Materials

The energy released when a substance burns completely in oxygen. ASHRAE 34 uses it, with LFL and burning velocity, to assign flammability classes.

• Materials

A sealed tube containing a working fluid and wick that moves heat by evaporation at the hot end and condensation at the cold end, with no pump. Heat pipes are common in air-cooled electronics.

• Hardware

The final stage of a cooling system, where heat removed from IT equipment is released to the atmosphere or a heat sink through chillers, dry coolers or cooling towers.

• Deployment Engineering

A metal block with embedded heaters that stands in for a chip during cold plate testing. Thermocouples in the block measure surface temperature so heat flux and thermal resistance can be calculated.

• Hardware

A leak test that fills a part with helium or a helium-nitrogen tracer gas and detects escaping helium with a mass spectrometer or sniffer. It finds leaks far smaller than pressure-decay or bubble tests can.

• Hardware

Catalysis in which the catalyst is in a different phase from the reactants, typically a solid surface acting on gases or liquids. It underpins automotive emissions control, chemical manufacturing and fuel processing.

• Materials

A refrigerant made of hydrogen, fluorine and carbon with only single bonds, such as R-134a or R-32. HFCs do not deplete ozone but many have high GWP and are being phased down under the Kigali Amendment and EU F-gas rules.

• Materials

A fluorinated ether, such as HFE-7100, used as a heat transfer fluid, solvent or cleaning agent. HFEs were widely studied as refrigerant candidates from the late 1980s.

• Materials

A refrigerant made of hydrogen, fluorine and carbon with at least one carbon-carbon double bond. The double bond makes HFOs break down quickly in the atmosphere, giving very low GWP. Examples include R-1234yf, R-1234ze(E) and R-1336mzz(Z).

• Materials
• Hardware

Evaluating very large numbers of candidate materials or molecules with fast calculations to shortlist the few worth making in the lab.

• Materials

The EU's main funding program for research and innovation for 2021 to 2027. It includes collaborative grants and European Innovation Council funding for startups.

• Full Lifecycle

A rack layout where racks face each other in alternating rows, so cold supply air enters from shared cold aisles and hot exhaust leaves into shared hot aisles.

• Deployment Engineering

A local region of a chip with much higher heat flux than the average, often at compute cores. Hot spots can exceed local cooling capacity even when total chip power is within limits.

• Hardware

The use of supercomputers or large clusters of processors working in parallel to solve problems too big for a single machine, such as climate modeling, molecular simulation and AI training.

• Full Lifecycle

The heat flow per unit area per degree of temperature difference between a surface and a fluid, in W/m²·K. Higher HTC means a cooler surface for the same heat flux.

• Hardware

A system design where people review, correct or approve AI output at defined points before it takes effect.

• Full Lifecycle

A blended model where the owner buys high-value, long-lead equipment such as transformers, switchgear, generators, chillers and CDUs, and the contractor supplies standard materials.

• Deployment Engineering

An equivalent diameter used to apply round-pipe flow correlations to non-circular channels, equal to four times the flow area divided by the wetted perimeter.

• Hardware

A strength test that fills a component with liquid and pressurizes it above its maximum operating pressure to confirm it does not leak or deform. Using liquid limits stored energy compared with a gas test.

• Hardware

Using data, literature and models to propose testable scientific explanations or candidate answers, ranked by the evidence behind them.

• Materials
• Full Lifecycle

The cloud service that controls who and what can access which resources. It uses users, roles and policies. On Kubernetes, IRSA (IAM Roles for Service Accounts) gives individual pods their own AWS permissions.

• Full Lifecycle

The World Health Organization agency that classifies substances by how likely they are to cause cancer in humans (Groups 1, 2A, 2B and 3).

• Materials

The model building code published by the International Code Council and adopted across most of the US. It covers structural design, fire safety, egress and occupancy requirements.

• Deployment Engineering

A telecommunications room or rack that connects local network cabling back to the main distribution frame or core network.

• Deployment Engineering

The international standard for industrial plugs, socket-outlets and couplers. Data centers use IEC 60309 pin-and-sleeve connectors to connect high-power racks and PDUs.

• Deployment Engineering

The International Electrotechnical Commission standard for calculating short-circuit currents in three-phase AC systems. It defines methods for maximum and minimum fault currents using equivalent voltage sources and correction factors.

• Deployment Engineering

The international safety standard for audio/video, information and communication technology equipment. It uses a hazard-based approach and may apply to cooling equipment such as CDUs that sit with IT hardware.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

A professional association that publishes many of the standards used in power-system engineering, including IEEE 1584 (arc flash), IEEE 141 and IEEE 493.

• Deployment Engineering

The IEEE recommended practice for electric power distribution in industrial plants, widely used as a reference for voltage drop, load flow and system design methods.

• Deployment Engineering

The IEEE guide for performing arc-flash hazard calculations. It gives empirically derived equations for arcing current and incident energy based on voltage, electrode configuration, gap and enclosure size.

• Deployment Engineering

The IEEE recommended practice for the design of reliable industrial and commercial power systems. It covers reliability data and methods for evaluating system availability.

• Deployment Engineering

An open, vendor-neutral file format (ISO 16739) for exchanging BIM data between software tools.

• Deployment Engineering

The status given to a drawing or document set once it is approved for contractors to build from. It follows permit and bid issues and marks the end of the design phase.

• Deployment Engineering

The metal lid bonded over a processor die that spreads heat and protects the silicon. Cooling hardware mounts to the IHS through a TIM2 layer.

• Hardware

The International Code Council model code for mechanical systems, covering HVAC equipment, ventilation, exhaust, ductwork and refrigeration.

• Deployment Engineering

A cooling method where servers are submerged in a tank of dielectric fluid, either single-phase or two-phase. It removes heat from all components but needs purpose-built hardware and changes serviceability.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

Cooling method where fluid is forced through small orifices to form high-velocity jets that "impinge" (spray/strike) directly on the surface being cooled, improving local heat transfer.

• Hardware

The amount of thermal energy, usually expressed in calories per square centimeter (cal/cm²), that a worker could be exposed to at a set working distance during an electrical arc flash. It drives arc-flash labeling and PPE category.

• Deployment Engineering

A check in which each engineering value is calculated by two independent methods and the results compared, so errors surface before review.

• Deployment Engineering
• Full Lifecycle

Running a trained AI model to produce outputs, such as predictions, text or simulations, as opposed to training the model.

• Full Lifecycle

A high-bandwidth, low-latency networking technology used to connect GPU servers in AI and HPC clusters, now at 800G and 1.6T per port.

• Deployment Engineering

Automatically pulling structured facts, such as requirements, constraints, quantities and units, out of unstructured documents like PDFs, datasheets and drawings.

• Full Lifecycle

The highest fault current a breaker or fuse can safely interrupt at its rated voltage, usually given in kA (kiloamperes). The NEC requires it to be at least the available fault current at the device.

• Deployment Engineering

A code defined in IEC 60529 that rates how well an enclosure keeps out solids (first digit) and water (second digit). For example, IP66 is dust-tight and protected against powerful water jets.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

A UK national supercomputing service run by the University of Bristol and funded through UKRI. It gives researchers large GPU allocations for AI and scientific computing.

• Full Lifecycle

Operation of part of a power system, such as a campus microgrid, disconnected from the utility grid and supplied only by local generation or storage.

• Deployment Engineering

The international standard for environmental management systems. It sets requirements for identifying, controlling and improving an organization's environmental impact.

• Full Lifecycle

The international standard for quality management systems. It sets requirements for documented processes, corrective action and continual improvement.

• Hardware
• Full Lifecycle

The final commissioning stage (L5) in which all power, cooling, controls and fire systems are tested together under simulated load and failure scenarios.

• Deployment Engineering

Racks that house compute and networking equipment (servers, GPUs, switches, etc.) within the MDC.

• Deployment Engineering

US export-control rules that restrict how defense-related articles, services and technical data are shared with foreign persons.

• Hardware

A structured review that breaks a task into steps, identifies the hazards in each step and sets controls to reduce the risk. It is also called a Job Hazard Analysis (JHA).

• Materials
• Hardware

A widely used empirical correlation for flow boiling heat transfer coefficients in tubes and channels, published by S. G. Kandlikar. It combines nucleate and convective boiling contributions using the boiling and convection numbers plus a fluid-specific factor.

• Hardware

A UK program, part-funded by Innovate UK, that places a graduate researcher in a company to deliver a project with a university partner. Intellectual property is allocated by agreement between the parties.

• Full Lifecycle

The unit of apparent power, equal to voltage times current in an AC circuit. Transformers, UPS and generators are rated in kVA; multiplying by power factor gives real power in kW.

• Deployment Engineering

Confirming a computational prediction by making and testing the material in a laboratory.

• Materials

An R&D workflow where computation and experiments feed each other in a cycle: models propose candidates, the lab tests them, and the results retrain the models to pick the next experiments.

• Materials
• Full Lifecycle

A sales strategy that starts with a small deployment in one team and grows it across the wider organization once value is proven.

• Full Lifecycle

Joining metal parts with a focused laser beam that melts a narrow, deep weld with little heat input. It suits thin, precise seals on copper and stainless parts.

• Hardware

The energy a unit mass of liquid absorbs when it turns to vapor at constant temperature. A high latent heat lets a two-phase coolant remove more heat per kilogram of flow than single-phase liquid.

• Materials
• Hardware

Standard acute toxicity measures. LC50 is the airborne concentration, and LD50 the dose, that kills 50% of a test population in a set period. Lower values mean higher toxicity.

• Materials

Sensors and methods that identify coolant leaks in liquid-cooled IT equipment, such as moisture cables, refrigerant gas detectors and pressure monitoring. Detection lets operators isolate faults before damage spreads.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

The quantity of fluid escaping from a sealed system per unit time, often expressed in mbar·L/s for gas tests. Specifications set a maximum allowable leak rate for acceptance.

• Hardware

A validation method that trains a model on all data points except one, predicts the held-out point, and repeats for every point. It gives an honest accuracy estimate for small datasets.

• Hardware
• Full Lifecycle

A static two-phase flow instability in which a boiling channel's pressure-drop curve allows more than one flow rate at the same pressure difference. In parallel channels it can cause flow to shift suddenly away from the hottest channels.

• Hardware

The combination of quantum-chemical method (for example a DFT functional such as ωB97M-V or PBE) and basis set used to generate reference data. Models trained on different levels of theory are not directly comparable.

• Materials

The lowest concentration of a gas or vapor in air that can support flame propagation. A refrigerant with no measurable LFL under standard test conditions is classed as non-flammable.

• Materials

A lithium-ion battery chemistry using lithium iron phosphate cathodes. It offers long cycle life and better thermal stability than other lithium chemistries, and is widely used for UPS and energy storage.

• Materials
• Deployment Engineering

Air terminals, down conductors and grounding that intercept lightning strikes and safely conduct the current to earth, protecting structures and equipment.

• Deployment Engineering

Selecting pipe and tube diameters so each line meets velocity, pressure drop and flow-regime limits for its fluid state. In two-phase loops, liquid, mixture and vapor lines have different limits.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

A structured review of published research on a question. AI-assisted surveys search, read and summarize papers, and cite the sources behind each finding.

• Materials
• Full Lifecycle

An AI model trained on large amounts of text (and often code and images) to understand and generate language. LLMs power chat assistants, coding tools and AI agents.

• Full Lifecycle

The logarithmic average of the temperature differences between hot and cold streams at each end of a heat exchanger. It is used to size exchangers from the equation Q = U·A·LMTD.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

A steady-state power-system analysis, also called a power flow study, that calculates voltages, currents, real and reactive power and losses across a network under defined operating conditions. It confirms that equipment stays within ratings and voltage limits.

• Deployment Engineering

The deliberate, prioritized disconnection of less critical loads when available power is insufficient, for example during a generator-only or single-source condition.

• Deployment Engineering

A dimensionless parameter comparing the liquid and gas pressure gradients in two-phase flow, used with a two-phase multiplier to estimate total frictional pressure drop.

• Hardware

An agentic workflow that runs for hours or days rather than seconds, such as a screening campaign or an experimental optimization loop, and must keep track of state, recover from failures and pause for human input.

• Full Lifecycle

Equipment with manufacturing lead times long enough to drive the project schedule, often transformers, switchgear, generators, gas turbines and chillers. It is usually ordered before the design is final.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

A parameter-efficient fine-tuning method. It freezes a model's original weights and trains small low-rank adapter matrices, which cuts the memory and compute needed to adapt large models.

• Full Lifecycle

A dimensionless number that expresses the pressure loss through a fitting, bend, valve, orifice or area change as a multiple of the flow's dynamic pressure. Engineers sum K factors to estimate minor losses in a piping loop.

• Hardware

The four adjustable trip functions of an electronic circuit-breaker trip unit. Setting each function lets engineers shape the breaker's response for coordination and equipment protection.

• Deployment Engineering

Electrical systems at or below 1,000 V AC. In North American data centers this is typically 480 V or 415 V three-phase distribution to UPS, PDUs and racks.

• Deployment Engineering

Mechanical & Electrical. Refers to the mechanical systems (cooling, HVAC, plumbing) and electrical systems (power distribution, cabling, backup power) in datacentre infrastructure. Critical components of datacentre design and operations.

• Deployment Engineering

The average absolute difference between predicted and reference values. MAE is the most common accuracy metric in materials and molecular ML benchmarks.

• Materials

A pipe or chamber that splits one flow into several branches or combines several flows into one. In liquid cooling, manifolds distribute coolant inside a cold plate, across a server tray or along a rack.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

A secured entry vestibule with two interlocked doors, where only one door can open at a time, used to control access into data center spaces. It is also called a sally port.

• Deployment Engineering

Mass flow rate per unit flow area, usually in kg/m²·s. Mass flux governs flow regime, heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop in two-phase channels.

• Hardware

A public benchmark and leaderboard that tests how well machine learning models predict the thermodynamic stability of new inorganic crystals, a proxy for how useful they are for discovering materials.

• Materials

Whether a fluid can stay in contact with the materials in a system, such as metals, seals, plastics and resins, over its lifetime without causing swelling, cracking, corrosion or contamination.

• Materials
• Hardware

The use of data science and machine learning to analyze materials data and predict material properties, with the aim of speeding up discovery and selection.

• Materials

A free, open database run by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with DFT-computed properties for hundreds of thousands of inorganic compounds. It is one of the main training and benchmarking sources for materials ML.

• Materials

An engineering workflow that carries a selected or newly discovered material straight into the design of the product that uses it, with shared data rather than a handoff between separate teams.

• Hardware
• Full Lifecycle

An open protocol that standardizes how AI applications connect to external tools and data sources, so an agent can discover a tool and call it through a common interface.

• Full Lifecycle

A simulation method that follows how atoms and molecules move over time by solving Newton's equations of motion using forces from a force field, a machine-learned potential or quantum mechanics. MD predicts properties that emerge from collective motion, such as diffusion, viscosity, phase behavior and structural changes.

• Materials

A secure room in a data center where carriers and customers physically interconnect their networks.

• Deployment Engineering

A unit of power equal to one million watts. Modern data centers operate at tens to hundreds of megawatts, making efficiency critical.

• Deployment Engineering

The ASHRAE 52.2 rating of an air filter's ability to capture particles, from 1 to 16. Data centers commonly use MERV 8 to MERV 13 filtration.

• Deployment Engineering

The grid of small cells or elements that divides a simulation domain. Mesh resolution controls simulation accuracy and cost, so engineers run mesh convergence studies.

• Hardware

An open-cell porous metal with high surface area and high porosity, usually described by pores per inch (PPI). Copper foam bonded to a cold plate base can raise boiling heat transfer and CHF.

• Materials
• Hardware

The two building blocks of a metal-organic framework. The metal node (or secondary building unit) is a metal ion or cluster; the organic linker is the molecule that bridges nodes to form the porous network. Choosing the node and linker sets the pore size and chemistry.

• Materials

A login security method that requires two or more independent proofs of identity, such as a password plus a code from an authenticator app or a hardware key.

• Full Lifecycle

A magnesium-based metal-organic framework (also called CPO-27-Mg) with open metal sites that bind CO2 strongly. It is a widely studied benchmark material for CO2 capture.

• Materials

NVIDIA's modular server reference architecture that standardizes chassis, board and cooling interfaces so system makers can build many configurations from shared parts.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

A cold plate with many parallel channels, typically tens to hundreds of microns wide, machined or formed into its base. Small channels raise surface area and heat transfer coefficient at the cost of higher pressure drop.

• Hardware

A local energy system with its own generation and often storage that can run connected to the grid or in island mode.

• Deployment Engineering

Machining of features at the tens-of-microns scale using very small end mills and high spindle speeds. It enables fine fin and pillar arrays for high-heat-flux cold plates.

• Hardware

An evaporator surface patterned with arrays of microscale pillars, often hollow or porous, that wick liquid to the heated area and hold a thin evaporating film.

• Hardware

An NVIDIA feature that splits one data center GPU, such as an A100 or H100, into several isolated GPU instances. Each instance has its own memory and compute.

• Full Lifecycle

The energy an ion must overcome to hop from one site to the next in a solid. Low migration barriers mean fast ion transport, which is essential for battery electrodes and solid electrolytes.

• Materials

A facility or system whose failure would cause severe operational, financial or safety consequences, so it is designed for continuous availability. The term is used broadly for data centers and their engineering.

• Deployment Engineering

A machine learning model that predicts the energy of a group of atoms and the forces acting on them, trained on quantum-mechanical reference data such as DFT calculations. MLIPs give close to DFT accuracy at a small fraction of the cost, so simulations can cover far more atoms and far longer timescales. Also called machine-learned force fields (MLFFs) or neural network potentials (NNPs).

• Materials
• Full Lifecycle

Tuning uncertain model parameters so simulation results match measured data, then checking accuracy on data the model was not fitted to.

• Hardware
• Full Lifecycle

An open, equation-based modeling language for physical systems that combine thermal, fluid, mechanical and electrical parts. OpenModelica is a free implementation.

• Hardware
• Full Lifecycle

A class of porous crystalline materials built from metal ions or clusters (nodes) connected by organic molecules (linkers). Their very high internal surface area and tunable chemistry make them candidates for gas storage, separation, CO2 capture and catalysis. The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognized the development of MOFs.

• Materials

Orbital Industries' all-atom generative AI model for metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). It generates new MOF crystal structures of up to around 500 atoms.

• Materials
• Full Lifecycle

An independent benchmark from the Moosavi group at the University of Toronto that tests interatomic potentials on metal-organic framework simulations, such as structure, heat capacity and adsorption.

• Materials

Orbital Industries' web interface for searching and analyzing the MOF structures generated by Mofasa.

• Materials

The smallest number of units a supplier will accept in one order.

• Materials
• Hardware

An analysis of the voltage dip and current inrush when large motors start, to check that the supply and other connected loads stay within limits.

• Deployment Engineering

A written, usually non-binding agreement that sets out two or more parties' shared goals, roles and intended next steps before they sign a binding contract.

• Full Lifecycle

An umbrella contract that sets the general legal terms between two parties, so later work can be agreed through shorter documents such as SOWs.

• Full Lifecycle

The principal low-voltage distribution board that receives power from a transformer or generator and distributes it to downstream UPS, PDUs and mechanical loads.

• Deployment Engineering

Combining models of different accuracy and cost, such as correlations, reduced-order models and full CFD, so cheap models narrow the search and expensive ones confirm the best designs.

• Hardware
• Full Lifecycle

Electrical systems operating above about 1 kV and up to roughly 35 kV in North America (often quoted as 11–33 kV internationally). Utility services to data centers usually arrive at medium voltage and are stepped down on site.

• Deployment Engineering

The temperature at which a liquid boils at standard atmospheric pressure (101.325 kPa). For blends, the equivalent figures are the bubble point and dew point.

• Materials
• Hardware

A purchase term under which an order cannot be cancelled and the goods cannot be returned once placed, common for custom or long-lead electrical equipment.

• Deployment Engineering

A quality record raised when a product, part or process does not meet its specification. It documents the defect, disposition (use-as-is, rework or scrap) and follow-up actions.

• Hardware
• Full Lifecycle

A contract in which parties agree to keep shared information confidential.

• Full Lifecycle

A method for finding the minimum-energy path and energy barrier between two known structures, by optimizing a chain of intermediate images. DFT-NEB is the gold standard for ion migration barriers but is slow.

• Materials

The US standard for the safe installation of electrical wiring and equipment, published by NFPA as NFPA 70 and updated every three years. Most US jurisdictions adopt it into law, so it governs how data center power systems are designed and inspected.

• Deployment Engineering

A North American rating system from the National Electrical Manufacturers Association that classifies electrical enclosures by environment and protection level. For example, NEMA 1 is indoor general-purpose and NEMA 3R is outdoor rain-resistant.

• Deployment Engineering

A cloud provider that specializes in renting GPU compute for AI training and inference, as distinct from the general-purpose hyperscale clouds. Neoclouds often raise capital quickly and need facilities built fast.

• Deployment Engineering
• Full Lifecycle

A US nonprofit that publishes fire, electrical and life-safety codes, including NFPA 70 (NEC), NFPA 70E (electrical safety in the workplace), NFPA 72 (fire alarm) and NFPA 101 (Life Safety Code).

• Deployment Engineering

The NFPA standard for electrical safety in the workplace. It sets requirements for arc-flash and shock risk assessment, safe work practices, labeling and personal protective equipment.

• Deployment Engineering

A technique that uses magnetic fields to probe atomic nuclei (such as 1H or 19F) and reveal a molecule's structure. 19F NMR is especially useful for confirming fluorinated products.

• Materials

Toxicology values from dose studies. NOAEL is the highest tested dose with no observed adverse effect. LOAEL is the lowest dose at which an adverse effect was seen.

• Materials

Capital that does not require giving up equity, such as government grants, R&D tax credits, research contracts and prizes.

• Full Lifecycle

Nitric oxide (NO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2), air pollutants formed during high-temperature combustion. Tightening NOx limits, such as the EU's Euro 7 standard, drive demand for better emissions catalysts.

• Materials

The margin between the pressure at a pump inlet and the fluid's vapor pressure, expressed as head. If available NPSH falls below the pump's required NPSH, the pump cavitates.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

The US standard for tapered pipe threads, which seal by thread interference plus sealant or tape. NPT fittings are common on instruments and small process lines.

• Hardware

The boiling regime in which discrete vapor bubbles form at nucleation sites on a heated surface and detach into the liquid. It gives very high heat transfer coefficients at modest surface superheat, which makes it the target regime for two-phase electronics cooling.

• Hardware

A small cavity, scratch or pore on a surface where vapor bubbles form during boiling. Surface treatments that add stable nucleation sites lower the superheat needed to start boiling.

• Materials
• Hardware

A dimensionless heat transfer coefficient: the ratio of convective to conductive heat transfer across a fluid boundary layer. Correlations for Nu let engineers estimate HTC for a given geometry and flow.

• Hardware

Standard statistical ensembles for molecular dynamics. NVE holds particle number, volume and energy constant; NVT holds temperature constant using a thermostat; NPT holds pressure and temperature constant using a barostat, so density can change as it would in the lab.

• Materials

An NVIDIA toolkit for accelerating AI-driven chemistry and materials simulation on GPUs.

• Materials
• Full Lifecycle

NVIDIA's reference design and partner ecosystem for building gigawatt-scale AI factories, covering power, cooling, facility design and digital-twin simulation. It is also known as Omniverse DSX.

• Deployment Engineering
• Full Lifecycle

A liquid-cooled NVIDIA rack-scale system with 72 Blackwell GPUs and 36 Grace CPUs connected by NVLink into one large GPU domain. It draws roughly 120–140 kW per rack.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

NVIDIA's Blackwell Ultra superchip combining Grace CPUs and Blackwell Ultra GPUs, deployed in liquid-cooled NVL72 racks. Each GPU runs at about 1,400 W TDP, which makes liquid cooling mandatory.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

An NVIDIA module that pairs a Grace Arm-based CPU with a Hopper GPU over a high-bandwidth NVLink-C2C link. It is designed for large AI and HPC workloads.

• Full Lifecycle

NVIDIA's Hopper generation of data center GPUs. The H100 and H200 are widely used for AI training and inference. The H200 adds 141 GB of faster HBM3e memory.

• Full Lifecycle

NVIDIA's next rack architecture for Rubin Ultra systems, designed for very high GPU counts per rack and 800 VDC power, with rack power in the 600 kW to 1 MW range.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

A Rubin-family GPU variant designed for long-context inference, deployed alongside standard Rubin GPUs in higher-power rack configurations.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

NVIDIA's high-bandwidth GPU-to-GPU interconnect. In NVL72 racks it links 72 GPUs into a single domain, which is why AI racks are built so densely.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

Documents handed over at project completion that describe how to operate, maintain and service installed equipment and systems.

• Deployment Engineering

The Open Compute Project's Advanced Cooling Solutions project, which develops open requirements and specifications for liquid cooling, including cold plate, CDU, quick disconnect, wetted-material and two-phase workstreams.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

Ozone Depletion Potential (ODP) is a numerical metric that quantifies the relative amount of degradation a chemical compound can cause to the Earth's stratospheric ozone layer. It is a standardized measure used in environmental regulations to evaluate the potential for substances, particularly refrigerants used in data center cooling systems, to harm the ozone layer.

• Materials

The 2021 OECD definition of PFAS: any fluorinated substance containing at least one fully fluorinated methyl (-CF3) or methylene (-CF2-) carbon atom, meaning a carbon with no hydrogen, chlorine, bromine or iodine attached. It is the basis for the EU's proposed class-wide PFAS restriction.

• Materials

Internationally agreed methods from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development for testing chemical safety, such as OECD 403 for acute inhalation toxicity. Regulators accept the results across member countries.

• Materials

The maximum airborne concentration of a substance a worker can be exposed to without expected harm, usually averaged over an 8-hour shift. PEL, TLV and WEEL values are all types of OEL.

• Materials
• Hardware

Original Equipment Manufacturer. Third-party vendors supplying key components (e.g., GPUs, CDUs, fans) that Orbital Industries integrates.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

The UK energy regulator for Great Britain's gas and electricity markets. It is reforming how large demand users, including data centers, join the grid connection queue.

• Deployment Engineering

Broader sense of customer-furnished equipment/components used in OFCI-type models.

• Deployment Engineering

A goal-setting framework that pairs a qualitative objective with a few measurable key results, reviewed on a fixed cycle such as each quarter or half-year.

• Full Lifecycle

An open dataset from Meta FAIR of more than 100 million DFT calculations on inorganic bulk materials, including non-equilibrium and high-temperature structures, released to train universal interatomic potentials.

• Materials

An open dataset from Meta FAIR of more than 100 million DFT calculations on molecules, including biomolecules, metal complexes and electrolytes, computed at the ωB97M-V/def2-TZVPD level of theory.

• Materials

The point at which a heated surface first becomes hot enough, relative to the local saturation temperature, to activate bubble nucleation. Below ONB the coolant removes heat by single-phase convection only.

• Hardware

A separate management network that gives remote access to IT and infrastructure equipment even when the main network is down.

• Deployment Engineering

Cold plate design with no solid "bottom" between coolant and chip. The liquid directly contacts the CPU/GPU surface to minimize thermal resistance and maximize heat transfer.

• Hardware

An AI model whose weights (and often code) are published under a license that lets others use, modify and redistribute it.

• Materials
• Full Lifecycle

A free, open-source C++ toolbox for CFD, with solvers for turbulent, multiphase and conjugate heat transfer flows. It is run from the command line and scripted rather than through a graphical interface.

• Hardware
• Full Lifecycle

A document that sets out the owner's goals and functional requirements for a building or facility, including performance, reliability and operating needs. The design team's basis of design responds to it, and commissioning verifies against both.

• Deployment Engineering

A company that applies AI to materials discovery, hardware engineering and manufacturing to build critical physical products. Founded in 2022 and headquartered in London, with sites in San Francisco and Calgary.

• Full Lifecycle

Orbital IT (Orbital Industries Infrastructure Technologies) is the Orbital Industries brand for data center buyers. It engineers and procures data center infrastructure for AI workloads, covering cooling, power distribution and modular deployment.

• Deployment Engineering
• Full Lifecycle

The former name of Orbital Industries.

• Full Lifecycle

The chemistry of compounds containing carbon-fluorine bonds. The C-F bond is the strongest single bond in organic chemistry, which gives fluorinated molecules their stability and non-flammability, and also their environmental persistence.

• Materials

The third-generation OCP Open Rack standard, which defines rack dimensions, a 48 V busbar power shelf and interfaces for liquid cooling manifolds and blind-mate connections.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

An organic molecule added during zeolite synthesis that acts as a template, guiding the framework to form a particular pore structure. OSDAs are often the most expensive ingredient in zeolite production.

• Materials

The US federal agency that sets and enforces workplace safety and health standards, including electrical safety and construction site rules.

• Deployment Engineering

A detailed schematic of a process system showing piping, equipment, valves, instruments and control loops. P&IDs are the basis for safety reviews, procurement and commissioning.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

Precision Air Conditioning (PAC), a traditional air-based data-center cooling approach that liquid cooling replaces at high densities.

• Deployment Engineering

An outdoor transformer in a locked, ground-mounted steel cabinet that sits on a concrete pad, commonly used to step utility medium voltage down to 480 V for data center modules.

• Deployment Engineering

An open-source Python library for power-system modeling and analysis, including load flow, short-circuit and state estimation.

• Deployment Engineering

A table that lists every circuit in a panelboard, with breaker size, poles, phase, connected load and description. It is a standard part of an electrical drawing set.

• Deployment Engineering

An electrical enclosure containing buses and branch-circuit breakers that distributes power to final circuits. It is smaller than a switchboard and is typically wall-mounted.

• Deployment Engineering

CAD modeling in which geometry is driven by named dimensions and rules, so changing a parameter regenerates the model consistently.

• Hardware
• Full Lifecycle

A chemical surface treatment that removes free iron and contaminants from stainless steel (or stabilizes copper surfaces), leaving a protective oxide layer that resists corrosion.

• Materials
• Hardware

A simulation setup in which a small box of atoms is repeated infinitely in every direction, so a crystal or bulk liquid can be modeled without surface effects.

• Materials

A molecular-based equation of state that models fluids as chains of spherical segments. It predicts phase behavior of pure fluids and mixtures from a small set of fitted parameters.

• Materials
• Hardware

The server-level coolant loop of cold plates, hoses and fittings that has no pumps of its own and is fed by a CDU and rack manifold.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

A company's defined sequence of phases, reviews and deliverables that takes a product from concept through design, validation and release to production.

• Hardware

A device that distributes electrical power to servers, networking equipment, and other IT infrastructure within a data center rack or facility. PDUs range from basic power strips to intelligent units that provide monitoring, remote control, and power usage analytics at the outlet level.

• Deployment Engineering

The stamp and signature a licensed Professional Engineer applies to drawings and calculations to certify they were prepared under their responsible charge and meet applicable codes. It carries legal liability.

• Deployment Engineering

The EU directive (2014/68/EU) that sets design, manufacturing and conformity requirements for pressure equipment above set pressure and volume thresholds.

• Hardware

A steel building system with frames, purlins and cladding designed and fabricated off site to standard configurations, then erected quickly on site.

• Deployment Engineering

An authorized, simulated attack on a system by security specialists to find vulnerabilities before real attackers do.

• Full Lifecycle

A family of oxides with the crystal structure of CaTiO3 (general formula ABO3). Their tunable chemistry makes them useful for catalysis, oxygen transport, fuel cells and solar cells.

• Materials

The energy of a system of atoms as a function of their positions. Stable structures sit at minima of the surface, and reaction pathways pass through saddle points (transition states). Simulation methods differ in how accurately and cheaply they approximate the PES.

• Materials

A water mix containing 25% propylene glycol by volume, used in cooling loops for freeze protection and corrosion inhibition, at some cost to heat capacity.

• Materials
• Deployment Engineering

A plot of the vibrational frequencies of a crystal lattice against wave vector. Phonons govern thermal conductivity, heat capacity, thermal expansion and dynamic stability.

• Materials

An OSHA Laboratory Standard category for select carcinogens, reproductive toxins and substances with high acute toxicity. They require extra controls such as designated areas and fume hoods.

• Materials

AI applied to things that exist and operate in the physical world, such as materials, machines, manufacturing and infrastructure, as opposed to software-only applications.

• Full Lifecycle

Two modes of adsorption. Physisorption holds molecules on a surface through weak van der Waals forces and is easily reversed. Chemisorption forms chemical bonds with the surface, binds more strongly and usually needs more energy to reverse.

• Materials

Any data that can identify a specific person, such as a name, email address, phone number or ID number. Privacy laws such as GDPR require it to be handled with specific controls.

• Full Lifecycle

A time-limited, scoped deployment of a product on a real customer workflow, with success criteria agreed up front, used to prove value before a larger contract.

• Full Lifecycle

A heat sink or cold plate feature made of an array of small posts rather than continuous fins. Pin arrays promote mixing and allow flow in two directions across the plate.

• Hardware

An efficient method for calculating long-range electrostatic (Coulomb) interactions in periodic simulations. It splits the calculation into a short-range part computed directly and a long-range part computed on a grid with fast Fourier transforms.

• Materials

A part number is the unique identifier for a part, assembly or document. Revision rules define when a change needs a new revision and when it needs a new part number. A change to form, fit or function usually requires a new part number.

• Hardware

A small, early test that shows whether an idea or technology works in principle, usually before a full pilot or production deployment.

• Full Lifecycle

A product that solves one narrow problem or workflow step, without connecting to the tools and data around it.

• Full Lifecycle

A schedule of every monitored and controlled input and output (sensors, commands, alarms) in a building automation system.

• Deployment Engineering

Boiling of a stagnant liquid pool on a heated surface, with fluid motion driven only by buoyancy and bubble activity. Pool boiling tests are a standard way to compare boiling surfaces and measure CHF.

• Hardware

A point of presence (PoP) is an artificial demarcation point or network interface point between communicating entities. A common example is an ISP point of presence, the local access point that allows users to connect to the Internet with their Internet service provider (ISP).

• Deployment Engineering

Amount of power (and therefore heat) generated per unit area/volume of a chip; newer Nvidia chips are ~5–10× more power-dense.

• Deployment Engineering
• Hardware

The ratio of real power (kW) to apparent power (kVA) in an AC circuit. A low power factor means more current for the same useful power, so utilities and designers often add power factor correction.

• Deployment Engineering

A separate rack placed beside IT racks that converts facility AC power to high-voltage DC, used to bring 800 VDC to racks in facilities with conventional AC distribution.

• Deployment Engineering

An umbrella term for the engineering analyses that validate an electrical design, typically load flow, short-circuit, protective coordination and arc-flash, plus voltage drop, harmonics and motor starting where needed.

• Deployment Engineering

A data center delivery model where the developer provides the building structure with utility power delivered to site, and the tenant installs its own UPS, generators, cooling and IT. Also called a warm shell.

• Deployment Engineering

Power Purchasing Agreement. A long-term contract for the purchase of electricity from a power generation facility, often used to secure renewable energy supply at fixed rates.

• Deployment Engineering

A supplier-quality framework from the automotive industry (AIAG). Suppliers submit evidence, such as dimensional results, material certificates, process flow and control plans, to show they can produce a part to specification at production rates.

• Hardware

A widely used reinforcement learning algorithm. It improves a policy in small, clipped steps to keep training stable, and is often used to fine-tune LLMs from reward signals.

• Full Lifecycle

A document that defines what a product must do: its users, performance targets, interfaces, constraints and acceptance criteria. Engineering designs and tests are traced back to it.

• Hardware

A sprinkler system whose pipes stay dry until a detection system confirms a fire and opens a valve, reducing the risk of accidental water discharge in IT spaces.

• Deployment Engineering

A leak test that pressurizes a part, isolates it and watches for pressure loss over a set time. It is simple and fast but less sensitive than tracer-gas testing.

• Hardware

The loss in fluid pressure across a component or loop due to friction, fittings, changes in area and elevation. Pressure drop sets pump size and, in two-phase loops, also shifts the local saturation temperature.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

Maintenance scheduled at set intervals, such as calibration, filter changes and inspections, to prevent equipment failure instead of waiting for it to break.

• Materials
• Deployment Engineering

A direct electrical connection between a generator, such as a solar or wind farm, and a nearby consumer that bypasses the public grid.

• Deployment Engineering

A complete, released set of drawings, material and finish callouts, tolerances, test requirements and documentation that a manufacturer can build and inspect against without further design input.

• Hardware
• Full Lifecycle

Predicting physical, chemical or safety properties of a molecule or material from its structure using models rather than measurement.

• Materials

A study that sets the trip settings of breakers, fuses and relays so that the device closest to a fault opens first, isolating the problem while the rest of the system stays energized. When coordination is required by code for critical systems it is called selective coordination.

• Deployment Engineering

A closed cooling loop in which a pump circulates refrigerant to evaporators (cold plates), where it partly boils, and a condenser returns it to liquid. Unlike thermosiphons or heat pipes, the pump sets flow rate independently of gravity or wicking.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

A coupling that connects and disconnects a liquid line by hand without tools, usually with valves that seal both halves when separated. Dripless QDs are standard at server-to-manifold interfaces in liquid-cooled racks.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

A public database of thousands of metal-organic framework structures with quantum-mechanically computed properties, used to train and test ML models for MOFs.

• Materials

A model that relates a molecule's structure to a measurable property, such as boiling point or viscosity, using statistical or machine learning methods.

• Materials
• Hardware

Government tax relief for companies that spend on qualifying research and development. In the UK it is administered by HMRC, and similar schemes exist in the US and Canada.

• Full Lifecycle

The standard refrigerant name assigned under ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 34, such as R-134a or R-1234yf. The numbering encodes the molecule's composition; R-4xx numbers are zeotropic blends and R-5xx numbers are azeotropic blends.

• Materials

The amount of power drawn by the IT equipment in a single server rack, measured in kilowatts (kW) per rack. Traditional air-cooled racks run at roughly 5 to 15 kW, while AI racks can exceed 100 kW, which usually requires liquid cooling.

• Deployment Engineering

A flexible power cable assembly, usually pre-terminated with an industrial connector, that runs from a PDU, RPP or busway tap box to a rack.

• Deployment Engineering

The simplest power-distribution topology, where each load is fed from one source through a single path with no alternate feed. It is low cost but has no redundancy.

• Deployment Engineering

Radiation safety covers the training, shielding, interlocks and monitoring needed to work with X-ray and other ionizing radiation sources. Dosimetry is the measurement of the radiation dose people receive, usually with personal badges.

• Materials

A technique where an AI system first retrieves relevant documents or data and then generates its answer using that material, which grounds responses in specific sources.

• Full Lifecycle

Fast fabrication of physical test parts, through CNC, 3D printing or quick-turn suppliers, so designs can be tested in days rather than months.

• Hardware

A data center delivered from prefabricated, factory-tested modules so it can be installed and energized in months rather than the 18 to 24 months of a traditional build.

• Deployment Engineering

An open-source framework for distributed Python. It scales training, simulation and data-processing workloads across many CPUs and GPUs.

• Full Lifecycle

A structured investigation that identifies the underlying cause of an incident or defect, not only its symptoms, so corrective action prevents it from recurring.

• Full Lifecycle

A liquid-cooled coil mounted on the back door of a rack that cools hot exhaust air before it re-enters the room. It suits retrofits up to roughly 40–50 kW per rack.

• Deployment Engineering

An open-source cheminformatics toolkit for reading and writing molecular formats such as SMILES, generating 2D and 3D coordinates, computing descriptors and drawing molecules.

• Materials

The EU regulation on the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (EC 1907/2006). It requires companies that make or import chemicals in the EU to register them with the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), and allows hazardous substances to be restricted. Great Britain has run a separate UK REACH regime since Brexit.

• Materials

The amount of backup capacity built into a critical system, written relative to N, the capacity needed to carry the full load. N has no backup, N+1 adds one spare unit, 2N duplicates the whole system, and 2N+1 duplicates it and adds a spare. More redundancy improves uptime but adds cost.

• Deployment Engineering

NIST's Reference Fluid Thermodynamic and Transport Properties Database, the standard reference software for refrigerant and fluid properties such as vapor pressure, density and enthalpy.

• Materials
• Hardware

A tank in a cooling loop that holds fluid inventory and, in two-phase systems, separates vapor from liquid so the pump draws only liquid.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

The legal requirement that a licensed engineer directly controls and supervises the engineering work they seal. State licensing boards define how it applies to work produced by others.

• Deployment Engineering

Planning how to make a target molecule by working backward from it, step by step, to simpler, commercially available starting materials. The result is a proposed synthetic route with reactions and conditions.

• Materials

Computer programs that search for synthetic routes automatically. ASKCOS (MIT) and AiZynthFinder (AstraZeneca) are open-source tools based on reaction templates and tree search; IBM RXN is a cloud service based on language models.

• Materials

Autodesk's building information modeling (BIM) software, used by architects and MEP engineers to produce coordinated 3D models and drawing sets.

• Deployment Engineering

A dimensionless ratio of inertial to viscous forces in a flow. It predicts whether flow is laminar or turbulent and appears in most friction and heat transfer correlations.

• Hardware

A formal written question from a contractor or project team member asking the designer to clarify drawings, specifications or site conditions. RFIs are logged and answered through the project record.

• Deployment Engineering

Request for Proposal (RFP), a formal procurement process used by enterprise and hyperscale customers.

• Full Lifecycle

The milestone when a data center, hall or module is fully commissioned and handed over for the customer to install or run IT load.

• Deployment Engineering

The Royal Institute of British Architects' framework that divides a building project into stages, from Stage 0 (Strategic Definition) through Stage 4 (Technical Design) and Stage 5 (Construction) to Stage 7 (In Use). It is widely used in the UK and for international data center projects.

• Deployment Engineering

A drawing that shows the vertical and horizontal routing of electrical or other building systems between floors and rooms, from the service entrance to distribution equipment.

• Deployment Engineering

A machine learning approach where an agent learns by taking actions in an environment and receiving rewards. For LLMs, RL trains a model toward outputs that score well on a reward or verifier.

• Full Lifecycle

In reinforcement learning, the environment is the task a model acts in. It supplies observations, accepts actions and returns rewards. For LLMs, an environment is often a problem set with an automatic scoring function.

• Full Lifecycle

An EU directive (2011/65/EU, amended by 2015/863) that limits lead, mercury, cadmium and other hazardous substances in electrical and electronic equipment.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

A simplified model that reproduces the key behavior of a detailed simulation or system at much lower computational cost, for fast screening, control or optimization.

• Hardware
• Full Lifecycle

The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) wall boiling model of Kurul and Podowski, the standard CFD approach for subcooled flow boiling. It splits wall heat into convection, quenching and evaporation using sub-grid correlations, so the mesh does not need to resolve individual bubbles.

• Hardware

A temperature sensor that infers temperature from the electrical resistance of a metal element, usually platinum. RTDs are more accurate and stable than thermocouples over moderate ranges.

• Hardware

Independent organizations that operate the high-voltage grid and wholesale power markets across a region, such as PJM, ERCOT, MISO or CAISO, and manage interconnection queues.

• Deployment Engineering

Rapid Thermal Swing Chemisorption (RTSC), a thermochemical process used for carbon dioxide capture and regeneration.

• Materials

A packaged HVAC unit installed on a roof that provides heating, cooling and ventilation through ductwork below.

• Deployment Engineering

The NVIDIA platform planned after Vera Rubin, expected around 2027 with GPU power above 2,000 W and rack densities near 600 kW. Industry analysis expects it to push single-phase liquid cooling toward its limits.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

A quick-release pipe connection standardized under ASME BPE. Two flanged ferrules are sealed with a gasket and held by a hinged clamp. It is common in lab, pharmaceutical and test-loop plumbing.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

The temperature and pressure at which a liquid and its vapor coexist in equilibrium. Raising pressure raises the saturation (boiling) temperature, which is how two-phase systems tune their operating point.

• Materials
• Hardware

US federal programs, known as 'America's Seed Fund', that give non-dilutive R&D grants to small US businesses through agencies such as NSF, DOE and DoD.

• Full Lifecycle

Taking a chemical process from lab quantities (grams) to pilot and commercial production (kilograms to metric tons), which often needs a different route, equipment and safety controls.

• Materials

Specialist company that takes a lab-scale synthetic route and manufactures much larger volumes of a material.

• Materials

Standard Cubic Feet per Minute (SCFM), a unit measuring airflow in cooling and HVAC specifications.

• Deployment Engineering
• Hardware

The standard US design phases for building projects. Schematic design sets the concept, design development fixes systems and sizes, and construction documents give the full drawings and specifications used for permitting, bidding and building.

• Deployment Engineering

The anchoring and bracing of equipment and structures so they stay in place and keep working during an earthquake, designed to the local seismic design category.

• Deployment Engineering

Heat that changes a substance's temperature without changing its phase. Single-phase liquid cooling removes heat as sensible heat, so capacity depends on flow rate and allowed temperature rise.

• Hardware

A written description of how a building system's controls operate under normal, failure and maintenance conditions, used to program and commission the controls.

• Deployment Engineering

Long-term storage of captured CO₂ (e.g., injection into geological formations/porous rock).

• Materials

Further training a pretrained model on labeled input-output examples so it learns a specific task, format or domain. It is usually the first step before reinforcement learning.

• Full Lifecycle

Detailed drawings prepared by a fabricator, supplier or contractor that show how a specific item will be made and installed. They are submitted for the design team's review.

• Deployment Engineering

An analysis that calculates the maximum and minimum fault currents that can flow at each point of a power system when a short circuit occurs. Engineers use it to confirm that breakers, fuses and busbars can safely withstand and interrupt those currents.

• Deployment Engineering

A transparent window in a pipe or vessel that lets operators see fluid level, phase or flow. In two-phase loops it shows whether a line carries liquid, vapor or a mixture.

• Hardware

A porous layer made by fusing metal powder or particles to a surface at high temperature below the melting point. Sintered copper coatings add nucleation sites and capillary wicking for boiling heat transfer.

• Materials
• Hardware

A pre-assembled module of equipment, such as pumps, heat exchangers, valves, controls or electrical gear, mounted on a steel frame so it can be built and tested in a factory, shipped as one unit and connected on site.

• Deployment Engineering

Fins formed by precision-shearing thin slices from a solid metal block and bending them upright, so fin and base are one piece. Skiving produces very thin, closely spaced fins without braze joints.

• Hardware

Commercial power-system analysis software, often called SKM, used for short-circuit, protective device coordination and arc-flash studies.

• Deployment Engineering

A resin 3D printing process that cures liquid photopolymer layer by layer with a UV laser or projector. It gives smooth, detailed polymer parts for prototypes.

• Hardware

A simplified drawing of an electrical power system that shows each three-phase circuit as a single line, along with sources, transformers, switchgear, protective devices and loads. Also called a one-line diagram, it is the backbone document of any power-system design.

• Deployment Engineering

The ratio of vapor velocity to liquid velocity in a two-phase flow. A slip ratio above 1 means the vapor phase moves faster than the liquid, which affects pressure drop and void fraction.

• Hardware

An internal reliability target for a service, such as 99.9% successful requests or a maximum response time. An SLO is measured against a service level indicator and usually sits inside any contractual SLA.

• Full Lifecycle

An open-source workload manager used on most academic and national supercomputers. It schedules batch jobs onto compute nodes and manages queues and allocations.

• Full Lifecycle

A text notation that writes a molecule's structure as a single line of characters, for example CCO for ethanol. SMILES is the standard input for cheminformatics and molecular ML models.

• Materials

Building working software tools, such as dashboards, trackers or calculators, by describing them in natural language to an AI system instead of commissioning a development project.

• Full Lifecycle

An engineering calculation run by a deterministic numerical engine with verified data tables, rather than generated by a language model. The same inputs always give the same result.

• Deployment Engineering
• Full Lifecycle

A written, step-by-step instruction for carrying out a routine task safely and consistently.

• Materials
• Hardware

A material that captures and holds a target gas or liquid, either on its surface (adsorbent) or throughout its bulk (absorbent). Solid sorbents for CO2 capture include amine-functionalized supports, zeolites and MOFs.

• Materials

AI compute capacity built and controlled within a country's borders, often backed by governments, to keep data, models and infrastructure under national jurisdiction.

• Deployment Engineering
• Full Lifecycle

The extra thermal resistance created when heat from a small source spreads laterally through a thicker base into a larger cooled area. It matters most for small, high-flux dies on large cold plates.

• Hardware

A consolidation process that passes pulsed DC current through a powder or stacked parts under pressure, heating them rapidly to sinter or diffusion bond.

• Hardware

A login method that lets a user access several applications with one set of company credentials, managed by an identity provider.

• Full Lifecycle

A decision point between phases of a project or sales process where defined criteria must be met before work moves on.

• Full Lifecycle

An on-site engine-generator, usually diesel or natural gas, that supplies power when the utility fails. Data centers size and arrange generators to meet their redundancy target.

• Deployment Engineering

The raw chemical or substance that a synthesis or manufacturing process begins with and converts into intermediates or the final product. In regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals, the defined starting material marks where Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) controls begin.

• Materials

A neutral CAD exchange format (ISO 10303) that stores exact 3D geometry so models can move between CAD systems.

• Hardware

A mesh file format that approximates a 3D surface with triangles. It is the common input format for 3D printers and some simulation tools.

• Hardware

Data center power or space that is paid for or available but cannot be used, often because cooling or distribution cannot support the rack density tenants need. It is also called stranded power.

• Deployment Engineering

LLM output that must follow a set format or schema, such as JSON with named fields and types, so that software can parse it reliably.

• Full Lifecycle

A solid-state switch that transfers a load between two independent power sources within a few milliseconds, fast enough that IT equipment does not see the interruption.

• Deployment Engineering

The amount by which a liquid's temperature sits below its saturation temperature at the local pressure. Subcooled liquid at a pump or cold plate inlet protects against cavitation and delays boiling onset.

• Hardware

The measurable conditions agreed before a pilot or project starts that determine whether it has succeeded.

• Full Lifecycle

The study of chemical reactions and interactions at the surface or interface of a material, where catalysis, adsorption, corrosion and wetting take place.

• Materials

Ra is the arithmetic average deviation of a surface profile from its mean line, in microns. It is the most common surface finish specification on drawings and affects sealing, contact resistance and boiling.

• Hardware

The energy needed to increase a liquid's surface area, which controls wetting and how bubbles form and detach from a surface.

• Materials
• Hardware

A fast statistical or machine learning model trained to approximate an expensive simulation or experiment, so optimizers can explore many designs quickly.

• Materials
• Hardware
• Full Lifecycle

An assembly of switching and protective devices, such as circuit breakers, disconnects and relays, that controls, protects and isolates electrical equipment. Data centers use medium-voltage switchgear at the utility service and low-voltage switchgear for distribution.

• Deployment Engineering

How practical it is to actually make a proposed molecule or material with known reactions, available reagents and reasonable cost.

• Materials

The temperature measured at the top surface of a chip package or lid. Chip vendors often specify cooling requirements as a maximum case temperature, which is easier to measure than junction temperature.

• Hardware

A plug-in unit that connects to an overhead busway and feeds power down to a rack or equipment, usually with its own breaker or fuses.

• Deployment Engineering

A log-log graph that plots how long a protective device takes to trip at a given current. Engineers overlay TCCs of upstream and downstream devices to prove coordination.

• Deployment Engineering

The full cost of buying, running and disposing of an asset over its life, including purchase price, installation, energy, maintenance and end-of-life costs. In data centers it is used to compare options with different upfront and operating costs, such as air versus liquid cooling.

• Full Lifecycle

The liquid loop that carries coolant between the CDU and the IT equipment's cold plates, as defined in ASHRAE and OCP liquid cooling guidance. It is separate from the facility water system.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

An assessment that combines process modeling with cost estimates to judge whether a technology can be commercially viable at scale.

• Materials
• Full Lifecycle

The stakeholder who judges whether a product meets technical requirements, such as a CTO, head of engineering or chief architect, and often controls the shortlist.

• Full Lifecycle

The controls that keep one customer's data, users and compute separate from another's on a shared platform.

• Full Lifecycle

A tank or system that stores chilled or hot fluid to ride through cooling interruptions or shift cooling load in time.

• Deployment Engineering

A highly persistent chemical (CF3COOH) formed when some fluorinated refrigerants and other PFAS break down in the atmosphere. TFA accumulates in water and is itself classed as a PFAS.

• Materials

The resistance to heat flow at the interface between two solid surfaces, caused by microscopic gaps where the surfaces do not touch. Thermal interface materials and clamping pressure reduce it.

• Hardware

The margin between a component's operating temperature and its maximum allowed temperature. More headroom lets hardware run harder or tolerate hotter facility water.

• Materials
• Hardware

The amount of heat generated by compute hardware that must be removed to maintain safe operation.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

The temperature rise per watt of heat flow across a component or interface, in K/W or °C/W. Cold plate performance is often quoted as thermal resistance from chip case to coolant inlet.

• Hardware

A temperature sensor made of two dissimilar metal wires joined at a tip, which produces a small voltage proportional to temperature. Type T (copper-constantan) thermocouples are common for accurate low-temperature lab work.

• Hardware

A passive two-phase or single-phase loop in which gravity and density differences drive circulation, with no pump. Vapor rises to a condenser and liquid returns by gravity.

• Hardware

The ANSI/TIA standard for telecommunications infrastructure in data centers. It covers site, architectural, electrical, mechanical and cabling requirements, and defines four rated levels of resilience.

• Deployment Engineering

A breaker that connects two otherwise separate buses, commonly in a main-tie-main arrangement. It is normally open and closes so one source can carry both buses when the other is lost or under maintenance.

• Deployment Engineering

Tungsten Inert Gas welding, also called Gas Tungsten Arc Welding (GTAW). It uses a non-consumable tungsten electrode and inert shielding gas for precise, clean welds on stainless steel, aluminum and copper.

• Hardware

A material placed between two mating surfaces, such as a chip lid and a cold plate, to fill microscopic air gaps and cut contact resistance. Common types include greases, pads, phase-change materials, liquid metals and solder.

• Materials
• Hardware

Industry shorthand for the two thermal interface layers in a lidded chip package: TIM1 sits between the silicon die and the lid (integrated heat spreader), and TIM2 sits between the lid and the heat sink or cold plate.

• Hardware

The standard box on each drawing sheet that shows the firm, project, sheet number, revision, dates and the engineer's seal.

• Deployment Engineering

The temperature of the active semiconductor junction inside a chip. Chip vendors set a maximum junction temperature, and the cooling system must keep Tj below it at full load.

• Hardware

The highest assembly in a product's bill of materials. It contains all subassemblies and parts of the finished product.

• Hardware

An occupational exposure guideline published by ACGIH (American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists). It is widely used as a best-practice limit even where it is not legally binding.

• Materials
• Hardware

A calculation that combines the dimensional tolerances of the parts in an assembly, by worst-case or statistical methods, to check that the assembly still fits and works at the extremes.

• Hardware

Contract manufacturing in which a specialist company mixes refrigerant or chemical components to a customer's formulation and packages the result, without owning the product.

• Materials

An open-source, PyTorch-native engine for running batched atomistic simulations with machine-learned potentials on GPUs.

• Materials

The percentage of rated voltage needed to drive full-load current through a transformer's windings with the secondary shorted. It largely determines how much fault current the transformer lets through.

• Deployment Engineering

The search for the highest-energy point along the lowest-energy path between reactants and products. The transition state sets the activation energy and therefore the rate of a reaction.

• Materials

A gas separation process in which a sorbent captures a gas at low temperature and releases it when heated, then cools to repeat the cycle.

• Materials
• Deployment Engineering

The main US law regulating industrial chemicals, administered by the EPA. New chemical substances need EPA review, usually through a premanufacture notice, before they can be manufactured or imported, and the EPA has added PFAS reporting requirements under TSCA.

• Materials

Thermal Swing Sorption Enhanced Reaction (TSSER), a process used for regenerating CO₂ sorbents using thermal cycles.

• Materials

A silicon test die with built-in heaters and temperature sensors that mimics the heat output of a real processor. TTCs give more realistic heat flux and hot-spot behavior than simple heater blocks.

• Hardware

A plate that conducts heat from components to a cooled surface or cold plate, used where components cannot be cooled directly by liquid.

• Hardware

A closure model that approximates the effect of turbulence in Reynolds-averaged CFD. The k-ω SST model blends near-wall and free-stream formulations and is common for internal flows and heat transfer.

• Hardware

TWA is the average exposure concentration over a full shift, typically 8 hours. STEL is the maximum average concentration allowed over a short period, typically 15 minutes. Together they define most occupational exposure limits.

• Materials
• Hardware

A cold plate in which the coolant boils as it absorbs heat from the chip, so heat is removed mainly as latent heat at near-constant temperature. Two-phase cold plates need careful design of boiling surfaces, vapor paths and flow distribution.

• Materials
• Hardware

The characteristic patterns liquid and vapor form when flowing together in a pipe, such as bubbly, slug, churn, stratified and annular flow. The regime controls heat transfer, pressure drop and flow stability.

• Hardware

A correction factor that scales single-phase frictional pressure drop to estimate the pressure drop of a liquid-vapor mixture. Common versions include the Lockhart-Martinelli, Chisholm and Friedel methods.

• Hardware

Rated Insulation Voltage. In electrical engineering and equipment specifications (particularly circuit breakers and contactors following IEC standards), Ui is the maximum voltage that equipment insulation can safely withstand. Commonly referenced in North American datacentre power specifications.

• Deployment Engineering

A UK Government strategy (published in 2025) that sets out how the UK will use AI to accelerate scientific research and discovery, covering compute, data, talent and priority research areas.

• Materials
• Full Lifecycle

The UK government body that funds research and innovation. It includes the seven research councils and Innovate UK.

• Full Lifecycle

A safety science company that develops standards and tests and certifies products against them. A UL listing is often required by US codes and AHJs before equipment can be installed.

• Deployment Engineering

The UL Outline of Investigation for modular data centers. It covers the safety evaluation of prefabricated, self-contained data center modules, including their electrical, fire and mechanical systems.

• Deployment Engineering

The UL safety standard for dead-front switchboards rated 1,000 V or less. Remote power panels and main switchboards in data centers are often built and listed to it.

• Deployment Engineering

An MLIP trained on a very broad dataset so that it works across most of the periodic table without being retrained for each material. Universal potentials act as foundation models for atomistic simulation and can be fine-tuned for a specific system.

• Materials
• Full Lifecycle

A simulation of one repeating element of a periodic structure, such as a single fin channel or pin, with periodic boundary conditions. It predicts the behavior of the full array at a fraction of the cost.

• Hardware

The share of time a system or data center is running and available, usually expressed as a percentage over a year. For example, 99.99% ("four nines") uptime allows about 53 minutes of downtime per year.

• Deployment Engineering

The Uptime Institute's four-level rating of data center infrastructure resilience: Tier I (basic capacity), Tier II (redundant components), Tier III (concurrently maintainable) and Tier IV (fault tolerant). Certification is granted in stages, for design documents and for the constructed facility.

• Deployment Engineering

An OCP-defined quick disconnect specification (with a blind-mate variant, UQDB) that sets a common envelope and interface so couplings from different vendors can mate.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

Verification checks that work was done correctly against its specification; validation checks that the result meets the real need. Together they form a standard quality process in engineering and software.

• Deployment Engineering
• Full Lifecycle

A flat, sealed heat spreader that holds a small amount of working fluid which evaporates at the hot spot and condenses on cooler areas, returning by a wick. It spreads concentrated heat over a larger area.

• Hardware

The pressure exerted by a vapor in equilibrium with its liquid at a given temperature. High vapor pressure means a system must be built to higher pressure ratings.

• Materials
• Hardware

The mass fraction of vapor in a flowing liquid-vapor mixture, from 0 (all liquid) to 1 (all vapor). Exit vapor quality is a key design parameter for two-phase cooling loops because it links heat load, mass flow and dryout risk.

• Hardware

A widely used commercial software package for periodic DFT calculations on solids, surfaces and interfaces, licensed per research group.

• Materials

A standard set of security, privacy and compliance questions that an enterprise sends to a software supplier before approving it.

• Full Lifecycle

NVIDIA's AI platform after Blackwell, pairing the Vera CPU with Rubin GPUs, arriving in 2026 with 100% liquid-cooled racks. GPU power is expected to reach about 2,300 W per package.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

A brand-name aspirating smoke detection (ASD) system that draws air through sampling pipes to a sensitive laser detector, detecting smoke long before conventional detectors.

• Deployment Engineering

Building software by describing what you want to an AI coding tool and accepting its output with little manual review of the code.

• Full Lifecycle

A computational environment where scientists test ideas on candidate materials through simulation and data analysis before running physical experiments.

• Materials

A CFD method that tracks the interface between two immiscible phases by solving for the volume fraction of one phase in each cell. It resolves bubbles and interfaces directly but is computationally expensive.

• Hardware

The fraction of a channel's cross-sectional area (or volume) occupied by vapor in two-phase flow. It differs from vapor quality because vapor usually moves faster than the liquid.

• Hardware

A calculation of how much voltage is lost along a conductor between the source and the load, based on current, conductor size, length and impedance. Designs keep voltage drop within a set percentage so equipment receives adequate voltage.

• Deployment Engineering

A commercial MLOps platform for tracking machine learning experiments. It logs metrics, hyperparameters, model artifacts and system usage for each training run.

• Full Lifecycle

The difference between a heated wall's temperature and the saturation temperature of the adjacent liquid. Boiling curves plot heat flux against wall superheat.

• Hardware

The composition of a refrigerant blend, after leaks or partial evaporation change its makeup, that is the most flammable. ASHRAE 34 classifies blends on both their nominal composition and their WCFF.

• Materials

A dimensionless ratio of fluid inertia to surface tension. It helps predict droplet and bubble breakup and jet behavior in two-phase and impingement flows.

• Hardware

The EU directive (2012/19/EU) that sets collection, recycling and recovery targets for electrical and electronic equipment at end of life.

• Hardware
• Deployment Engineering

All materials in a cooling system that come into contact with the coolant, including metals, braze alloys, elastomers and plastics. Wetted materials must resist corrosion, swelling and leaching over the system's life.

• Materials
• Hardware

The area of a data center where IT racks are installed, as opposed to gray space, which holds electrical, mechanical and support equipment.

• Deployment Engineering

A letter from a utility confirming it can supply a project with a stated capacity, voltage and service arrangement, often including available fault current. It is a key early input to electrical design and site selection.

• Deployment Engineering

A machining process that cuts conductive metal with a thin electrified wire, using controlled sparks. It produces precise, burr-free features that are hard to machine conventionally.

• Hardware

The amount of gas a sorbent actually releases and recaptures in each adsorption-desorption cycle under real operating conditions. It is usually lower than the maximum capacity measured in a single isotherm.

• Materials

A Green Grid metric equal to annual site water use in liters divided by IT equipment energy in kilowatt-hours. Lower is better; evaporative cooling drives it up.

• Deployment Engineering

The ratio of reactance to resistance in a power system at a fault location. It sets how asymmetrical the first cycles of fault current are, which affects breaker interrupting duty.

• Deployment Engineering

A crystalline aluminosilicate with a regular network of molecular-sized pores. Zeolites are used at industrial scale as catalysts, adsorbents and ion exchangers, including in automotive emissions control and gas separation.

• Materials

A three-letter code assigned by the International Zeolite Association (IZA) to each distinct zeolite framework topology, for example CHA (chabazite), AEI or FAU. The IZA database holds the reference structures.

• Materials

A zeotropic blend is a refrigerant mixture whose components boil at different temperatures, so the mixture boils over a temperature range instead of at one point. The difference between the start (bubble point) and end (dew point) of boiling is the temperature glide.

• Materials
• Hardware