BU and Red Hat Forge $5 Million Partnership
From BU Today:
Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source enterprise software, is joining in a five-year-long partnership with Boston University, an arrangement aimed at advancing research into emerging and translational technologies, such as cloud computing and big data platforms. The collaboration, celebrated Monday evening at a dinner at the home of Robert A. Brown, BU president, will involve researchers from both Red Hat and BU, and will provide opportunities for students, staff, and faculty to drive new ideas and new technologies.
Orran Krieger, director of BU’s Cloud Computing Initiative and the University’s lead on the partnership, says Red Hat appreciated the potential of such a research collaboration after working with BU to develop software on the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC), at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center in Holyoke, Mass.
Krieger, who is also a College of Engineering professor of the practice of electrical and computer engineering and a Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering resident fellow, says project plans include support for two research labs, one at Red Hat’s new corporate space in Boston’s Seaport district and one on the Charles River Campus. The collaboration, to be managed by an oversight committee made up of key technical personnel at BU and Red Hat, calls for the creation of a Red Hat Incubator that will pursue exploratory research and development based on proposals solicited from across the BU and Red Hat communities. It will provide fellowships to selected PhD students in the College of Arts & Sciences computer science and ENG electrical and computer engineering departments, as well as support for full-time and part-time postdocs and visiting scientists, among them those from universities involved in MOC projects.