It’s being called “collaboration on an unprecedented scale.” That’s just some of the phraseology being used to describe efforts on the part of several parties to bring a high-performance computing center, or super-computing facility, to the city of Holyoke. The massive initiative, with a price tag on the order of $100 million, would, say its proponents, enable the state to catch up to other regions of the country that have HPCCs, while providing a critical boost for the region and a city that has been searching for ways to rekindle its status as a home to industry and innovation.

‘Ping,’ ‘power,’ and ‘pipe.’

These are the terms commonly used in an exercise in alliteration to designate the three main ingredients — a high-speed network, electrical power, and cooling infrastructure — needed to create a high-performance computing center (HPCC), and make it affordable, says Jim Kurose, distinguished professor of Computer Science at UMass Amherst, who has been using those words with great frequency lately.

Holyoke can provide all three, he told BusinessWest, and in the requisite comparatively low-cost manner. And this has made the city the chosen site for a planned HPCC, or supercomputing center, a facility with a projected price tag of $80 million to $100 million, that would be created through a collaboration currently involving UMass, MIT, Harvard, Boston University, EMC, Cisco, the state, the city of Holyoke, the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission — and probably many more partners.

This was the news that leaked out of Holyoke City Hall earlier this month and then driven home at an announcement featuring Gov. Deval Patrick, the presidents of those aforementioned colleges, Holyoke Mayor Michael Sullivan, and a host of other dignitaries squeezed into a meeting room in the city’s public library.

At that session’s end, the main players signed a memorandum of understanding, specifically an agreement to spend the next 120 days reviewing the ambitious proposal and determining if, how, when, and perhaps where to proceed.

Which means the next four months will be a critical — and anxious — time for many constituencies, from those institutions of higher learning to state officials eager to help script economic-development success stories, to those now governing Holyoke.

“Let’s hope there’s some good news when it’s over,” said Mayor Michael Sullivan, with a very large dose of understatement. He has had a front-row seat from which to watch this intriguing development play out, which means he’s seen a lot.

“It’s been a blessing and a bane,” he said, noting that there were times, and apparently many of them, when the project seemed dead in the water, only to be revived, apparently because of the recognized need for such a facility — which would put huge amounts of computing horsepower to work on research initiatives — and the determination of the players involved.

The need is apparent, and it’s huge, said Victor Zue, professor of Electrical Engineering and director of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at MIT. He noted that faculty members and administrators at the college have been discussing such need for years, and quietly putting together plans for an MIT-financed and -operated HPCC.

It was MIT President Susan Hockfield, said Zue (pronounced ‘zoo’), who initiated discussions to bring other partners into the project, including the state university. And by the fall of last year, the list of potential partners had grown to include BU, Cisco, and EMC, as well as the Patrick administration.

Meanwhile, first MIT and then the assembled partners identified Holyoke, one of the nation’s first planned industrial cities, and now one of the state’s poorest communities, as the most logical and attractive site for the HPCC.

The city boasts the ping, in the form of proximity to bandwidth, specifically a high-speed fiber-optic line that runs along the Mass. Turnpike, said Kurose, who has been one of the point people on the project for UMass. It also has the power and the pipe, in the form of affordable and ‘green’ hydropower supplied by the Holyoke G&E.

Some locations can provide the renewable-energy component, but Holyoke has the complete package, said Kurose, noting that it is also one of the Commonwealth’s so-called Gateway Cities — older, industrial centers that have become the focus of many of the state’s economic-development initiatives.

By most accounts, the assembled partners have taken plans for a HPCC a long way in a fairly short time, said UMass President Jack Wilson, who told BusinessWest that many hurdles must still be cleared if the center is to become reality. Matters still to be determined include who will pay for the center, what operating model will be used, where the center will be located, and what design will be incorporated.

But the biggest issue. said Wilson, is the economy, which is deeply impacting the three legs of the stool supporting this initiative — academia, private industry, and the Commonwealth — all of which must make important contributions if the center, which he considers imperative to the state’s ability to be a leader in the broad IT field, is to happen.

“You either decide that it’s going to be worth doing it for the long term and you find a way to do it, or you give up leadership, and that’s what it all comes down to,” he said, referring to the state’s competitive abilities. “A decision not to play in this space would basically mean ceding the field to people who have decided to play in this space.”

Speed Thrills

When asked why the Commonwealth doesn’t yet have a large-scale HPCC — there are several smaller ones run by individual colleges — Wilson thought for a minute and said, “good question … it should.”

Indeed, even with its bevy of colleges and universities, including several of the nation’s top research institutions (MIT and Harvard, among others), the Bay State is lagging behind other regions that now host HPCCs, and thus losing some of its competitiveness with regard to attracting both businesses and top talent, he said.

One of those regions is North Carolina’s Research Triangle, which boasts a facility — the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) — created through a collaborative effort involving North Carolina State University, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as the state and many communities. There are also HCCPs in California — including the San Diego Supercomputing Center and a facility known as CITRIS (the Center for Information Technology in the Interest of Society) — and facilities in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, among other states.

The center proposed for Holyoke amounts to a large, concerted effort to catch up, said Wilson, who told BusinessWest, in essence, that the state cannot afford to fall further behind.

“Our region suffers because it doesn’t have one; we’re way behind and should have done this a long time ago,” he told BusinessWest, noting that administrators at UMass, MIT, and other colleges and universities understood the need for a HPCC and, over the course of several meetings last fall, agreed to work together to create one.

Wilson said the importance of the project became abundantly clear to him at a meeting in January at his office in Boston, at which several administrators from MIT were to be briefed on the initiative. The region received about two feet of snow the night before, and Wilson doubted anyone would make it to the session. Instead, they all did, including a representative who had his marching orders. “He told me that President Hockfield told him that, if he didn’t make it to the meeting, he shouldn’t bother coming back to the campus.”

Such urgency on the part of all the players involved underscores the need to move on the matter of a HPCC, and move quickly, said Kurose, who, as he talked about what a high-performance computing center is and how one works, started by talking about FLOPS, or, to be more specific, teraFLOPS.

That acronym stands for ‘floating point operations per second,’ a measure of how fast a computer performs. The current gold standard is the teraflop, or 10 to the 12th power, said Kurose, although some of the latest computers are designed to eventually operate at three petaflops, or 10 to the 15th power.

Such computing horsepower is becoming essential today, he said, for work in such areas as life sciences, clean energy, and climatology, where modeling is the preferred research methodology. HPCCs provide this power either through huge clusters of commodity computers or specialized ‘supercomputers’ and their associated data storage.

Such computers are connected to each other and to users through high-speed networks capable of transmitting information at rates of billions of bits per second.

“Increasingly, people are running models for things like atmospheric research, weather predictions, or how proteins fold,” he explained. “And to do that you need lots and lots of FLOPS and computing cycles.

“So more and more universities are realizing that computing is a very important part of doing science and engineering,” he continued, “and so many of the individual schools were interested in scaling up and preparing themselves for larger amounts of computation to support science and engineering research.”

Zue told BusinessWest that faculty and staff at MIT have long recognized the need for a high-performance computing center — for both research and the ability to attract top talent — and have been exploring options for more than two years. The search has been statewide, he said, because those involved realized early on that Cambridge, where the college is located, was simply not an attractive location for such a facility.

“There is a lack of physical space in Cambridge, and electricity costs here are extremely high,” he said, noting that research into other sites revealed that Holyoke was “head and shoulders” above other locations in the state because of the availability of both a high-speed network and affordable, ‘green’ power.

By last fall, it became MIT’s goal to seek out partners for the HPCC initiative in the hopes of creating a larger, ‘green’ facility that could ultimately do more for the institute and the other players.

Kurose said the need for ‘green’ when it comes to HPCC design has become critical because of the sheer volume of computers and the sky-high cost of cooling them. Indeed, Kurose said the cost of cooling and maintaining computers now equals or exceeds the cost of buying the equipment, making energy bills — and the need to control them — a paramount concern.

This is evidenced by the fact that Tennessee’s HPCC, one of the latest to come online, uses hydro power provided by one of the state’s many Tennessee Valley Authority dams, said Wilson.

The need for ‘green’ is certainly not lost on those in the IT industry, said Sullivan, noting that Holyoke has been explored by private investors as the possible home to computing and data-storage facilities.

The combination of all these factors brought a growing number of partners to set their collective sights on Holyoke — and to eventually sit together at a table in that room in the library to sign the memorandum of understanding.

Building the Model

The parties involved will spend the next 110 days or so working out a number of issues, said Wilson, including cost breakdowns, funding formulas, operating models — and the overarching issue of feasibility.

A third party, Accenture, has donated an executive, one who has experience with such initiatives, to look over the plans and crunch the numbers, he explained.

“We want to test the work that we’ve done, refine it into a plan that will eventually move to a detailed design phase, which will eventually lead to a groundbreaking,” he said, adding that, in the best-case scenario, that groundbreaking might come in a year. “But there are a lot of issues to work out.”

In the meantime, there will be considerable discussion in the region about the impact of such a facility, how it might come together, and where. And much of that talk is in the form of conjecture.

One of the key issues is jobs, said Sullivan, who, like others, said it is too early to speculate on how many will be created and what kinds of jobs they will be. He estimates, though, that such a facility could easily create 1,000 jobs or more, in fields ranging from construction to maintenance; clerical to administrative. And there will be a critical need to train individuals to work in such a facility, he continued, adding that this will create opportunities for area schools, including the community colleges.

As for where the facility will go and what it will look like, again, there is mostly speculation. To effectively harness the hydro power, the facilities will likely be located on or near the city’s canals, said Sullivan, adding quickly that it remains to be seen whether the initiative will involve new construction, renovation of existing mills, or perhaps both.

As they talked about potential models for the HPCC, Zue and Kurose used terms like ‘condominium’ and even ‘campground.’ They allude to how these facilities have taken shape elsewhere, as well as to the probable shape of future super-computing centers.

Elaborating, Zue said the condominium approach allows the various players to share space, but not necessarily the same computers. As for the campground reference, he said the IT industry is moving increasingly toward placement of computers, thousands of them, in large storage containers, not unlike truck trailers, to further reduce the costs of cooling and maintaining the computer equipment.

“We waste so much energy cooling the room, when we can just cool the computer,” he explained, noting that the storage-container approach has been employed by Microsoft at a massive data-storage facility it has created in Chicago.

Further movement in this direction will eventually reduce or even eliminate the need for specially designed buildings, Zue continued, adding that old mill buildings may indeed be appropriate as homes for such containers.

If the center becomes reality, it will likely be rolled out in phases, said Wilson, noting that there are a number of questions that will have to be answered over the next four months. But essentially it boils down to two: ‘can the parties involved afford to move forward with the concept?’ and ‘can they afford not to?’

And Wilson believes it’s the latter.

“Everyone’s hurting in this economy, but that’s when you have to make the investments,” he said. “If you want to lead when you come out of this economy, if you want your people to have jobs, if we want them to have the lifestyle that our children deserve … then we have to make these investments.

“If you don’t make these investments,” he continued, “then you’ve clearly decided to leave the playing field.”

Powerful Statements

Recalling some of the earlier meetings on the planned HPCC, Wilson referenced a gathering at which he remembers Hockfield saying something to this effect: ‘Let’s keep this to a few of us for a while until we discover that huge problem that we can’t overcome so we can’t do it.’

“We laughed about that and agreed, but eventually decided that there wasn’t one; there was no obstacle we couldn’t potentially overcome,” he said, adding quickly that this realization, or outlook, has enabled the project to draw more partners and arrive at its current state of near-reality.

And he is hoping he can say the same thing in four months.

If he can, then the state and its colleges will be taking a giant step toward regaining a competitive edge, and Holyoke will have an exciting new chapter to write in its long, distinguished history of industry and innovation.

George O’Brien can be reached at obrien@businesswest.com