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IF THE JUNE 10 GATHERING at Microsoft in Cambridge, “A Framework for Collaboration in the Region’s Information Technology Sector,” was the launch of a far-reaching if not revolutionary industry collaboration, then the first shots “heard ‘round the world” were fired the very next day, on June 11, not in Concord, Lexington or Kendall Square, but in downtown Holyoke, where a memo of intent was signed, with plans to create a high-performance, green computing center in Massachusetts.
On an oak desk in the decorous Holyoke Public Library, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick joined with MIT President Susan Hockfield, University of Massachusetts President Jack M. Wilson, Boston University President Robert Brown, and Holyoke Mayor Michael Sullivan to sign a letter of intent to develop a plan for the Holyoke High-Performance Computing Center, along with industry executives from Accenture, EMC and Cisco. The newly planned, high-performance computing center will offer a wide range of computing resources, connecting clusters of computers and users via high-speed networks capable of transmitting information at rates of billions of bits per second.
Nationally, the movement to create new computer data centers is rapidly accelerating—in the last month Apple announced plans to build a $1 billion facility in North Carolina, the federal Social Security Administration said it plans to open a $800 million facility in Baltimore, Md., Yahoo announced plans to create a new data center near Albany, N.Y., IBM said it would be partnering with Syracuse University to build an on-campus data center, and Google opened its $600 million data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa. However, unlike most of these data centers, including the one that Apple is constructing to maintain its ever-increasing volume of data for its iTunes library, the new high-performance computing center in Holyoke will create new high-speed computing capacity to process information that is needed, for instance, in the work on drug discoveries using genomic data.
The gateway city of Holyoke in western Massachusetts, beset by difficult economic times—extremely high poverty and unemployment rates—provides three key ingredients for a high performance computing center: ping, power and pipe – a high-speed network, electrical power, and cooling infrastructure. Holyoke's location on the banks of the Connecticut River offers access to low-cost hydroelectric power, while the river and the city's many canals offer potential cooling resources. Existing fiber optic/network connections running along Interstate 91 readily allow access to major research universities around the state.
“The creation of a high performance computing center will advance the Commonwealth’s status as a global research and innovation leader and will spur the state’s ideas-driven economy,” said Jack Wilson, president of the University of Massachusetts. “This project is a textbook example of collaboration at its best, with state and local government, the research universities and industry coming together to create a world-class research facility that will benefit all sectors and will immediately become a key academic and economic asset for Massachusetts.” “Many of today's most important technical challenges will yield only to the power of high-performance computing, from modeling climate change to managing a massively complex ‘smart grid’ and developing novel materials for 21st-century technologies, from biomedicine to batteries,” said Susan Hockfield, MIT’s president. The distance between downtown Holyoke and the Microsoft offices in Cambridge along Memorial Drive may be only 70 miles as the crow flies, but the economic distance between the two cities has been, at least during the last two decades, separated by what seems like light years. Holyoke has lost 68 percent of its manufacturing jobs since 1960, less than one in five adults holds a bachelor’s degree, and its real income per capita growth of 13 percent between 1980 and 2000 is less than one-quarter of Greater Boston’s—59 percent—for the same period, according to a recent study by Mass Inc. Acknowledging that this new high performance computing center will do much to extend the benefits of the knowledge-based innovation economy beyond Greater Boston, University of Massachusetts President Jack Wilson turned to Governor Deval Patrick and praised his leadership in a time of economic crisis, saying: “All the other states are hunkering down; we’re not.” The Technology Exponential
Brooks, who is the current founder, chairman and CTO of Heartland Robotics, co-founder of iRobot, and the former director of the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, began with an oft-cited quotation by writer Arthur C. Clarke: “When it comes to technology, most people overestimate it in the short term, and underestimate it in the long term.” Next, with an engineer’s skill, Brooks invoked the legacy of insights in an article published in 1965 by Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel, which predicted home computers, electronic controls for cars, cell phones and integrated circuits. In turn, Brooks displayed the changing age demographics for both Japan and the United States, pointing out that things that are currently done by the working aged between 20 and 65 are going to be a much smaller portion of the population, so their productivity will have to be increased through information technology and robotics. “Technology exponentials,” he continued, “beget social exponentials. The exponential rate of change is proportional to the amount of stuff,” which he displayed as an equation of technological exponential.
Goodman shared the results from preliminary findings from the study, which he said involved a survey of 226 IT firms and was about three-quarters completed. The diagrammatic overview, configured as a Venn diagram, showed four distinct but converging sectors – IT services, software, hardware, and network connections – as well emerging clusters in robotics, gaming, mobile communications and digital media. “The information technology ecosystem is dynamic and diverse,” Goodman said. “Growth in the sector has been driven by small firms in the last decade,” he said. The survey results that Goodman shared debunked the often-stated belief that Massachusetts’ information technology sector would always be standing in the shadows of California and Silicon Valley.
The value of the survey, one observer noted in the bustle of the participants to move to three different breakout conversations, was that it provided a context in which to frame the different technology areas of the diverse IT industry sectors and how they interact, creating a useful map of the dynamic industry. Enlightened Participation And, after the first part of the morning spent listening, the participants were more than ready to engage in the commerce of ideas. The breakout sessions were designed to capture the intent of the 18-member committee that convened the day’s activities to engage in an inclusive conversation/dialogue about the sector, responding in part to Governor Deval Patrick’s challenge issued January 27, asking the industry IT/digital sector to create a collaborative approach to improve its competitive position. The organizing committee includes an impressive group of representatives from IBM, iRobot, Cisco, 38 Studios, Red Hat, Verizon, EMC, And, in a world now dominated by instant communication and social media networking, all the events of the day were being captured and recorded by EchoDitto and Microsoft, and posted on innovate.masstech.org, the home of the initiative’s blogosphere and Twitter activity. More than 50 interviews of participants, including Governor Patrick, were recorded on camera. A large number of the tweets came in from people not actually able to attend the event.
In introducing the communications breakout group, Emily Green, president and CEO of The Yankee Group, invoked the image of a chorus, projected a image of a 1974 photo of a school chorus, saying that currently “no one entity speaks for all” and there was a need to find some sense of harmony, to help organize the voice. Of course, some of these initial attempts to create a unified chorus sounded a bit cacophonous, with a tendency to have individuals share their “shout-outs” and ideas and notions. Down the hall, in the Crispus Attucks Room, there was further in-depth discussion of the pathways as the digital sector moves forward, led by the researchers at the Donahue Institute. And Steve Vinter, the Boston site director at Google, along with Jim Kurose, the interim dean of the College of Natural Science and Mathematics at UMass Amherst, explored how best to meet the talent needs for the growing digital sector. After the session, Kurose indicated that beyond the push for STEM initiatives, there was a basic need to involve “computing analysis” skills as part of the equation. Growing To Scale
Andy Ory kicked off the discussion by invoking the image of what he called three ghosts: the “ghost of Route 128 past,” the Wangs and Digitals that have faded; the ghost of “California’s present”; and the current ghost of Massachusetts’ future. The goal, he suggested, is to improve the productivity of business-creating engines: “How to build $1 billion companies predictably, repeatedly.” Desh Deshpande responded by saying that every entrepreneur faces the same issue: being told that their ideas cannot be done and overcoming the odds to do it. He likened entrepreneurship to the career of a boxer, willing to get into the ring and take the blows. The advantage of Boston and Massachusetts, he continued, was that here was a community of entrepreneurs to help develop a sense of confidence. Paul Sagan suggested that we needed to stop looking in the rear-view mirror, paraphrasing the quote from hockey star Wayne Gretzky, “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.” Most of the panelists agreed on the importance of mentorship and coaching, as well as need to celebrate entrepreneurship as a strong cultural value. They disagreed about the limits of sharing good ideas and non-compete clauses.
As the session came to a close, Governor Deval Patrick joined the audience and listened to the chairs of the working groups report on their sessions. The value of listening in a collaborative framework was underscored by the Governor’s attentiveness. The talent and workforce development breakout session, led by Steve Vinter and Jim Kurose, reported that there were “a thousand points of light” and it was imperative to create an “integrated” view of the multitude of initiatives and programs. The operative question was: how do we work together?
In the report from the working group on “understanding our digital sector moving forward,” there was a recognition of the need to be an incubator, to create “the jobs right here in Massachusetts.” The potential to exploit the state’s leadership and technological know-how in e-health was cited as a fertile opportunity. The Governor then took to the stage to announce that Massachusetts was underwriting a competition for young entrepreneurs, creating awards for the best business plan for a start-up company that would plan to stay in Massachusetts. (For details, click here.) He answered questions from the audience, many of whom, in turn, thanked him for his leadership and willingness to engage with the sector. As the morning session moved towards its successful conclusion, Governor Patrick left to give an impromptu news conference with the assembled television media.
In many ways, it was uncannily reminiscent of the story told earlier by Rodney Brooks, about a cartoon which was published as a tongue-in-cheek illustration with Gordon Moore’s prescient 1965 article in the now defunct magazine Electronics, which showed a guy selling handy home computers right next to a woman selling cosmetics and, on the other side, another man selling notions. According to Brooks, the cartoonist was making fun of Moore’s ideas—showing computers and cosmetics being sold together, as if to say: what a wacky idea. But, Brooks continued, it turned out to be completely accurate and true. |
Following Brooks’ keynote, Dr. Michael Goodman, director of economic and policy research at the Donahue Institute at the University of Massachusetts, which is in the midst of conducting a survey of the industry sector formerly known as IT, presented a “glimpse” at the current and future marketplace.
Flybridge Capital Partners, Yankee Group, Akamai, Visible Measures, Microsoft, Google, MIT, UMass and Azuki Systems (
Within the sector, clearly, there is an ongoing tension between the need to incent the development of new start-ups and the desire to scale up larger, more mature companies in Massachusetts in order to enhance innovation in the sector. 
Observing the give-and-take, it became clear that one of the challenges facing this collaborative effort is how to translate the process of coalescing a new identity for the digital/IT sector into a 30-second sound bite. It’s neither a dog-bites-man nor man-bites-dog story. Something very important had happened, yet it didn’t quite fit easily into the current landscape of news coverage.