In a medical emergency, the speed with which images are processed and shared could mean the difference between a positive outcome or a tragedy. That’s why technology experts at Boston Children’s Hospital, working with the Red Hat Collaboratory at Boston University, developed ChRIS Research Integration System, a web-based medical image platform that enables real-time collaboration between clinicians and radiologists around the world.

The platform, powered by Mass Open Cloud, is one of several projects made possible by a partnership between BU and Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions.

The Collaboratory, which has played a key role in securing tens of millions of dollars in federal research grants, was originally funded in 2017 by a $5 million grant from Red Hat. It has supported the research of 11 BU faculty, involving more than 22 different graduate students and close to 50 undergraduate students, and has led several dozen BU graduates to careers at Red Hat.

Those rewards, for both BU and Red Hat, persuaded each partner in 2021 to extend the relationship for five years. The renewal includes a donation by Red Hat of software subscriptions—with a retail value of $551.9 million—that spans from 2020–2023, and a commitment of $20 million to support research and deepen collaboration aimed at advancing research and education in open source and emerging technologies.

Eric Kolaczyk, director of the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, where the Collaboratory is housed, says the extension means the Collaboratory can increase the scale and scope of what they do and that all projects in an open research cloud initiative now hosted at the Hariri Institute will benefit. This includes the recently formed New England Research Cloud, a professionally operated cloud framework, run jointly by research computing organizations at BU and Harvard University.

“Now we can go after really ambitious team projects with high risk and high reward,” Kolaczyk says.