Water Piped Between High Circuits Makes Holyoke Sense

Phew! I am sitting at the end of the day in the window of the cafe. A familiar spot. My cafe acquaintance Paul told me some of what he knows about the Holyoke High Performance Computing Center that’s coming soon. He said in his government office they use water that snakes through the gigabytes of circuits of computers to cool them. No other town has canals that might be used this way. But it’s elegant and a throwback to the canal days of yore.

An even more important part of Holyoke’s appeal is its hydropower. Holyoke has its own power company, that owns the dam. The dam now has turbines on just one side, they could add another set and generate twice the power. But to do this you need a big customer, who doubles the use and creates the need for more generation. This computer center will need all of this and more since the level of their computing puts them at peak full tilt energy suck.

There are also plans to create a model super connected neighborhood. Holyoke might just be the city where this test by Cisco is to be carried out. We might have 100 mps service in the city this year!

I said hello to the new owner of Alina’s in town. He’s a beefy and friendly guy named Martin Amaya, and I’m going to pay him a visit on Friday for a cocktail. I think they are going to do well, people love a nice looking Italian place.