Scene: An abandoned brick building along the Connecticut River. The image dissolves, then reforms to show a new, ultra-modern factory in its place. Move to interior shot of computers and server banks. Brilliant academics ponder the future. Highly trained young professionals walk purposefully, the future alive in their eyes.
I have no idea whether the scene depicted above is accurate. But that’s the vision planted in my mind by the announcement earlier this month that the state of Massachusetts and a coalition of corporate and academic institutions—MIT, Boston University, the University of Massachusetts, Cisco, and EMC—had banded together to plan a High Performance Computing Center (HPCC) for Holyoke, MA.
Xconomy broke the news about the HPCC on June 9. The general idea is that a state-of-the-art “green” data and computing center in Holyoke, cooled by the Connecticut’s waters and powered by affordable, renewable hydropower, will establish Massachusetts as a leader in next-generation computing technologies and bring jobs and dollars to the depressed Holyoke region. The center would presumably house the networked servers and storage systems needed to address complex research problems in fields from genomics to climate modeling, as well as various commercial projects. “The potential for breakthrough technologies and research is enormous,” said Governor Deval “the Govinnovator” Patrick in a statement, “and both the center and this collaboration will undoubtedly serve to lift up the City of Holyoke and regional economies throughout Western Massachusetts.”
That’s the essence of the coverage to date. But, of course, that is only the beginning of the story—since the plan hasn’t even been finalized yet. I was especially interested in the corporate angle to all this, since corporate innovation is an issue I’ve spent a book or two exploring. And while to date this column has dealt mainly with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and startups, innovation really does happen in big companies, too. And so, against the backdrop of the envisioned High Performance Computing Center in Holyoke, this is a look at such an attempt.
My guest for today’s column is Jeff Nick, SVP and chief technology officer for EMC. The story he tells isn’t just of a data storage and management company wanting to spur the construction of an advanced computing center to grow its current businesses. Rather, Nick laid out a multi-tiered strategy of how EMC plans to combine its shorter-term business ambitions with efforts to explore the future in virtual computing, cloud computing, data management, security, and more within the confines of the fully operational, fully commercial data center.
At a high level, Nick characterized the project as offering “three dimensions of opportunity” for EMC and its R&D strategy. The first lies in the opportunity to test new techniques involving the center’s physical infrastructure, what Nick calls “ping, power, and pipe.” (“Ping” is a new term for me that Nick says refers to the way cables are physically laid down to network computers together.)
Systems infrastructure, as opposed to the physical infrastructure, is the second area of opportunity EMC’s chief technology officer sees. This covers areas such as virtualization—the specialty of VMware, a California company that is majority-owned by EMC—and cloud computing, the domain of EMC’s Cloud Infrastructure and Services Division.
These technologies will be both the undergirding for, and to some extent the subject of, the research projects envisioned for the new center. For instance, Nick says the HPCC will
