Smart City Technology's Growth Spurt

Two years ago, a consortium of five Boston-area universities and two tech giants (Cisco and EMC Corp.) decided to invest $168 million in a high-performance computing center in downtown Holyoke, a town of 40,000 situated in a region of western Massachusetts with an abundance of cheap hydroelectric power. The facility is meant to help researchers conduct data-intensive experiments and computations.

It didn’t take long for local civic leaders and the municipality to begin figuring out how to leverage the huge amount of computing power they would soon find in their midst. Eighteen months ago, the City of Holyoke convened an intensive stakeholder consultation to push local colleges, hospitals, emergency providers and not-for-profits to come up with ideas on how they could build and use a high-speed smart city network.