BU’s Red Hat Collaboratory, originally funded in 2017 with $5 million in grants from Red Hat, has been instrumental in helping to secure tens of millions of dollars in federal research grants. Photo by Janice Checchio

Accolades

BU and Red Hat Announce First Research Incubation Awards

Partnership focuses on innovation in open-source software solutions

For almost five years, Boston University and Red Hat, a leading provider of open-source computer software solutions, have collaborated to drive innovative research and education in open-source technology. Now that partnership has announced the first recipients of the Red Hat Collaboratory Research Incubation Awards. (Open source means that the original source code is made available for use or modification by users and developers.)

The awards are administered through BU’s Red Hat Collaboratory, housed within the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, and Red Hat Research. “This collaborative model gives us the opportunity to increase the diversity and richness of open engineering and operations projects we undertake together, and also allows us to pursue fundamental research under one umbrella,” says Heidi Picher Dempsey, Red Hat research director, Northeast United States.

The Collaboratory, originally funded in 2017 with $5 million in grants from Red Hat, has been instrumental in helping to secure tens of millions of dollars in federal research grants. Last year, Red Hat renewed its partnership with BU for five years and pledged a commitment of $20 million to support research and deepen collaboration aimed at advancing research and education in open-source and emerging technologies. Typical projects that receive funding through the collaboration are open source and targeted at solving systems problems with solutions that “show promise for advancing their fields and impacting the tech industry.”

Over the course of the partnership, it has supported the research of 11 BU faculty, involving more than 22 different graduate students and close to 50 undergraduates, largely working across the hybrid cloud space. Additionally, it has helped more than 20 BU graduates launch careers at Red Hat.

Following is the list of awards and descriptions; find more details on some of the projects here.

• AI for Cloud Ops, the Red Hat Collaboratory Research Incubation Award headline project, will receive $1 million over two years and focus on the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud systems. Red Hatters Steven Huels, Marcel Hild, and Daniel Riek will work alongside BU faculty Ayse Coskun, College of Engineering professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Alan Liu and Gianluca Stringhini, ENG assistant professors of electrical and computer engineering, along with a group of BU grad students and IBM researcher Fabio Oliviera to create new methods for intelligent data collection, fusing and representing systems data to enable AI-based analytics, and build, apply, and scale AI frameworks to improve performance, management, security, compliance, and resilience in the cloud.

• Creating a Global Open Research Platform to Better Understand Social Sustainability Using Data from a Real-Life Smart Village was awarded to Christos Cassandras, ENG professor of electrical and computer engineering, Vasiliki Kalavri, College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of computer science, John Liagouris, CAS adjunct assistant professor of computer science, Mayank Varia, Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences associate professor, and Red Hat staff Alexandra Machado, Jim Craig, and Christopher Tate.

• DISL: A Dynamic Infrastructure Services Layer for Reconfigurable Hardware, Martin Herbordt, ENG professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Uli Drepper and Ahmed Sanaullah of Red Hat.

• Towards High Performance and Energy Efficiency in Open Source Stream Processing, Vasiliki Kalavri, Jonathan Appavoo, CAS associate professor of computer science, and Sanjay Arora of Red Hat.

• Near-Data Data Transformation, Manos Athanassoulis and Renato Mancuso, CAS assistant professors of computer science, and Uli Drepper and Ahmed Sanaullah of Red Hat.

• Practical Programming of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) with Open Source Tools, Martin Herbordt and Uli Drepper and Ahmed Sanaullah of Red Hat.

• Symbiotes: A New Step in Linux’s Evolution, Jonathan Appavoo.

• Foundations in Open Source Education, Jonathan Appavoo.

• Linux Computational Caching, Jonathan Appavoo.

• Robust Data Systems Tuning, Manos Athanassoulis and Evimaria Terzi, CAS professor of computer science.

• Privacy-Preserving Cloud Computing using Homomorphic Encryption, Ajay Joshi, ENG associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.

• Serverless Streaming Graph Analytics, Vasiliki Kalavri.

• Secure Cross-Site Analytics on OpenShift Logs, John Liagouris.

• Enabling Intelligent In-Network Computing for Cloud Systems, Alan Liu.

• OSMOSIS: Open Source Multi-Organizational Collaborative Training for Societal-Scale AI Systems, Eshed Ohn-Bar, ENG assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering.

• Intelligent Data Synchronization for Hybrid Clouds, David Starobinski, ENG professor of electrical and computer engineering.