Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) is an intercollegiate

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a mult ...

facility located in Holyoke, Massachusetts, connected to that city's municipal fiber grid and powered by

Holyoke Gas and Electric Holyoke Gas & Electric (HG&E), formally known as the City of Holyoke Gas & Electric Department (HGED), is a municipal electric, gas, and telecommunications utility primarily serving Holyoke and Southampton, Massachusetts, one of two in Massachus ...

via the and

Dam A dam is a barrier that stops or restricts the flow of surface water or underground streams. Reservoirs created by dams not only suppress floods but also provide water for activities such as irrigation, human consumption, industrial use ...

. MGHPCC is a

joint venture A joint venture (JV) is a business entity created by two or more parties, generally characterized by shared ownership, shared returns and economic risk, risks, and shared governance. Companies typically pursue joint ventures for one of four rea ...

Boston University Boston University (BU) is a Private university, private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with ...

, Harvard,

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

, Northeastern, and the University of Massachusetts system; the facility holds the capacity for hundreds of thousands of cores in clusters provided by its affiliates. For example, as of 2016 one cluster used by UMass contained a network of 14,376 cores, both

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

and

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactur ...

, and more than 1.1 petabytes of on-site storage on an FDR

Infiniband InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also use ...

network. The facility maintains capacity for regular expansion, with key partners investing capability upgrades in the current building and more than 4 acres of additional undeveloped space.

History

The Center was first planned in early 2009 in joint discussions between MIT and UMass, with UMass President Jack M. Wilson being a key proponent of the project, and its eventual founding chair. Boston University, Northeastern, and Harvard joined the planning process soon thereafter. Holyoke was selected as the location on June 11, 2009. The specific site was announced on August 9, 2010; a century ago the site had housed a textile mill. Ground was broken on October 5, 2011. The topping off ceremony occurred on November 29, 2011. The facility was completed in November 2012.

Funding

Funding for the construction of the facility came first and foremost from the five university partners. The state of Massachusetts pledged $25 million toward associated costs. Additional support came from Cisco Systems, and EMC Corporation. The

U.S. Department of Commerce The United States Department of Commerce is an executive department of the U.S. federal government concerned with creating the conditions for economic growth and opportunity. Among its tasks are gathering economic and demographic data for busin ...

spent $2.1 million on hydroelectric infrastructure improvements to support the center and similar businesses in the city's Innovation District.

Infrastructure

USA Holyoke location map municipal fiber network

Holyoke Gas and Electric partnered with the consortium to do the site selection and to contract for the provision of green power from their hydroelectric facilities. Between 2011-2013, Holyoke Gas and Electric constructed the new North Canal Substation located on Water Street which provides the electrical service for the computer center via two dedicated 34.5 kV feeders directly from the substation's 34.5 kV bus. The MGHPCC shares the 34.5 kV bus exclusively with the Hadley Falls Hydro Electric station, the largest of HG&E's hydro facilities, which creates a direct power path to the computing center from the Hadley Falls plant. Two 115 kV/34.5 kV transformers at the substation connect the bus to the transmission system and provide electricity from the grid to the computing center when the hydro plant is offline or generating less power than the computing center is using. These transformers also function to deliver excess power to the grid when the Hadley Falls station is producing more output than what the computing center is using. Holyoke's municipal fiber optic network would also play a decisive role in the location of the computing center, and with its construction, a dedicated link 10gbps was built for the facility's educational affiliates on specialized networks such as the

Internet2 Internet2 is a not-for-profit United States computer networking consortium led by members from the research and education communities, industry, and government. The Internet2 consortium administrative headquarters are located in Ann Arbor, Mi ...

consortium.

Research

The MGHPCC facilities have been used for a wide variety of applications including, but not limited to, advanced iterative methods for modeling

molecular geometry Molecular geometry is the three-dimensional arrangement of the atoms that constitute a molecule. It includes the general shape of the molecule as well as bond lengths, bond angles, torsional angles and any other geometrical parameters that dete ...

, the behavior of stellar wind,

ecological resilience In ecology, resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to respond to a perturbation or disturbance by resisting damage and recovering quickly. Such perturbations and disturbances can include stochastic events such as fires, flooding, windstorm ...

of renewable energy systems, and neural circuitry. The facility also serves as a data processing center for a commercial and academic partnership hosted by

known as Mass Open Cloud, a collaborative project to create a novel decentralized public

cloud In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may ...

based on the Open Cloud eXchange model.

History

Funding

Infrastructure

Research

Notes

References

Further reading

External links