Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick traveled to Holyoke, MA, yesterday to talk about the next steps for the planned Holyoke High Performance Computing Center, a massive project designed to advance the state of the art in “green computing” for life sciences, cleantech, and other applications, while also bolstering business development in economically depressed western Massachusetts. Construction is slated to begin in the fall of 2010 and be completed in late 2011, the governor said.

The partners in the project—which is a collaboration between the Massachusetts state government, Accenture, Boston University, Cisco, EMC, MIT, and the University of Massachusetts—have raised over half of the money needed for construction, according to a press release yesterday from the governor’s office. (The actual dollar amounts weren’t named in the release.)

Since the state’s initial announcement about the project in June, the partners have made “considerable progress” on a working plan for the facility, according to the release. That includes setting up an organizational and business structure for the center, estimating capital costs and operating budgets, outlining a research agenda, and creating preliminary building designs and construction schedules. It’s expected that the facility will be located somewhere near the Connecticut River, which produces abundant hydroelectric power, or along Holyoke’s network of industrial canals, which could provide cooling water for its computing and climate-control equipment.

The three academic institutions contributing to the Holyoke center—BU, MIT, and UMass—issued a statement yesterday saying they are committed to “work diligently over the next 120 days with the Governor, Housing and Economic Development Secretary Bialecki, Energy and Environment Secretary Bowles, and other cabinet officials, Congressman Olver, Holyoke officials and our colleagues in industry to move to the next stage of planning the HPCC.” The statement said the next steps include acquiring a site, setting up agreements on how the various institutions involved will share responsibility for the center, and raising the rest of the money required.

Several entities assisting with the project—the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission, the City of Holyoke, and the John Adams Innovation Institute—have also collaborated to launch a website called Innovate Holyoke as a resource for news on the facility. The site was developed by Ten Minute Media, a Web design company run by young Holyoke-based entrepreneur Brendan Ciecko, who wrote about the computing center project for Xconomy in June.

In remarks yesterday, Governor Patrick said the computing center would serve as “an anchor of a highly competitive and vibrant innovation district in the Pioneer Valley,” which includes the three western Massachusetts counties traversed by the Connecticut River. “The potential for job growth and advances in technology and research is unprecedented, and both the center and this collaboration will serve to create long term prosperity for Holyoke and regional economies throughout Western Massachusetts.”

[Update, 10/23/09: The John Adams Innovation Institute of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative has published a useful summary of yesterday's event in Holyoke.]

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Civic leaders, economic visionaries, and passionate residents often claim that their city is the next to rebound. I say with confidence that my city is next in line for metamorphosis. Some find their new meaning through the arts and other organic movements, but in most recent accounts, it seems, a few deserving cities are staged for a comeback with the help of high-tech industry. Holyoke, Massachusetts, is one of these cities.

Last week, it was announced that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Massachusetts, and Boston University would be collaborating with Fortune 500 technology giants Cisco Systems and EMC and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to build a high-performance computing center (HPCC) in the city of Holyoke.

I got involved in the early stages of this effort back in October of 2008, when I was invited to a Technology Roundtable at MIT. It was surreal finding myself, a young web entrepreneur, talking with and having breakfast at the same table as Governor Patrick, MIT president Dr. Susan Hockfield, Cisco’s John Chambers, and various other leaders and innovators in the world of business and technology. Major topics included the future of the tech industry in Massachusetts, its impact on the state economy, and support of entrepreneurship. When the conversation moved in my direction, I was encouraged to share my thoughts and suggest various underutilized opportunities I saw as a young entrepreneur living and working in the western part of the state. I made what I hoped were persuasive statements for my city, advocating that it would be the premier location for sustainable, cost-effective, large-scale data centers. By the look on everyone’s faces, it was clear that Holyoke had been on their radar for such a project.

Western Massachusetts has many valuable resources that would make it an appealing and economically advantageous destination for the tech industry. But what firmly stands out in this region is the small city of Holyoke and its abundance of power—specifically, cheap, renewable hydro-electric power. The city receives approximately three-quarters of its energy from its hydro-electric sources, which include an expansive dam and turbines located along canals powered by water diverted from the Connecticut River. The municipality-owned utility company also announced recently that it would be acquiring hundreds of acres of land on a nearby mountain range to develop a high-capacity wind farm. In regards to technology, Holyoke already has an extensive high-speed fiber optic network throughout its downtown and is located along the Mass Information Turnpike backbone.

It is likely that Holyoke’s new computing and data center will be modeled after Google’s “Project 02″ in The Dalles, OR, and its data-center in Baudour, Belgium. Water from the river or industrial canals will be used to cool the servers and ensure that the hardware runs efficiently.

When it was founded in the mid-19th century, Holyoke was one of the first cities planned for industry—and it promoted its plentiful supply of inexpensive energy and labor to lure manufacturing businesses and investors. It became the center of the global paper industry and spurred tremendous amounts of wealth, laying claim to being the richest city per-capita in the United States by the 1920s. At the city’s prime, Holyoke’s cultural offerings were compared to those of New York City and Paris. After the Great Depression and general de-industrialization that struck the Northeast, Holyoke slowly began to lose its prosperity, businesses, jobs, population, and reputation. For as long as I can remember in my 21 years of existence, the city has been in rough shape. People often blame the city’s reputation as what’s repelling business—but real innovators, entrepreneurs, and “urbanists” see past that image and recognize this diamond in the rough. The raw, undisputed assets stare you straight in the face—and, finally, the right people are staring back. This new computing collaboration will be an anchor, attracting entrepreneurs and young minds eager for involvement in something of great magnitude.

As this high-profile project moves forward, I’d expect many eyes from the technology sector to be fixated on Holyoke. There is still over two-million square feet of vacant building space, consisting mostly of red-brick factory structures ready to be reclaimed by the high-tech community at bargain prices. Is there a chance that a company like Google might look at Holyoke for its next data-center in the Northeast? I believe it’s very likely.

I’m optimistic about what the future holds for the city of Holyoke. High tech offers the much-needed flow of capital, job creation, and stimulus that post-industrial cities like Holyoke desperately thirst for. With the escalating focus on green industry, sustainability, and long-term cost factors, Holyoke is a premier location for the Northeast IT sector. The beloved Queen of Industrial Cities as it was called at turn of the century, fell off her throne many decades ago, but is now back with a new purpose. Thanks to the forward-thinking powers at hand, Holyoke will be given a new identity as a coveted destination for high tech.

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