Institute Establishes Core Industry Partnerships for Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 27, 2015

CONTACT:  Kira Jastive, 617-358-1240, kjastive@bu.edu

(Boston) – The Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering at Boston University (BU) today announced the core industry partnerships for the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC). Led by BU, the MOC is a collaborative effort that also involves Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts, MIT, and Northeastern University, as well as the Massachusetts Green High-Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC). When completed, the MOC will be a public cloud designed and implemented in Massachusetts as the first “Open Cloud eXchange” (OCX) marketplace — a novel marketplace model for public cloud offerings.

The core partners that have joined the project are: Brocade, Cisco, Intel, Lenovo, Red Hat and Two Sigma. These companies span all the segments of the industry critical to the success of the MOC project including the hardware, software, and services sectors. Each has also made crucial in-kind commitments such as computer infrastructure, support for deploying and operating the MOC, and engineering support needed to develop and integrate the capabilities required for the OCX model.  In addition, these partners are each providing an executive sponsor to ensure the project is aligned with the strategic goals of their business and to assist the MOC as it develops its plans.

“We are thrilled to be working with and have the support of these industry leaders,” says Orran Krieger, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at BU and the MOC project lead. “Their involvement in this project is central to the mission and success of the MOC and we look forward to bringing Massachusetts to the forefront of cloud computing technology.”

“The MOC is a great example of the kind of academic, industry, and state government collaboration that we hoped to see when the MGHPCC consortium was founded,” said John Goodhue, Executive Director of the MGHPCC.  “Having these industry leaders join forces with the five founding universities – BU, Harvard, MIT, UMass, and Northeastern University – will strengthen an already impressive collaboration among government, industry and public and private universities in the Commonwealth.”

In cloud computing, customers rent access to massive off-site computational resources and services offered through companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Like those, the MOC will be a public cloud, meaning that any customer can access MOC resources and services on demand. But unlike those closed clouds (each operated by a single provider), the MOC will be open to multiple vendors of software, hardware, and computer services. All vendors will have access to rich operational data about the MOC, such as what programs are running on it, and performance or problem reports. More importantly, they will be able to expose unique capabilities, distinguishing features, and novel services.

According to Azer Bestavros, Professor of Computer Science at BU and Director of the Hariri Institute, the OCX marketplace model, which he proposed with Orran Krieger in 2013, provides an open and customizable approach to the design and operation of cloud computing that “stands in sharp contrast to the closed and prescribed solutions offered by today’s single-provider clouds.” Accordingly, “in the MOC, multiple entities will engage on a level playing field to provide computing resources and services as well as add value to offerings by other entities in support of a wide range of data-driven applications,” he says.

Bestavros compares the MOC to a shopping mall: “MOC vendors and service providers would be the equivalent of mall stores, selling their products and services at the MGHPCC. Banding together in a mall-like organization would permit them collectively to draw enough workload to leverage economies of scale,” Bestavros says. MOC customers would range from academic researchers to corporations and others.

“Massachusetts is proud to be a ‘first-mover’ in this paradigm changing platform in cloud computing,” stated Pat Larkin, Director of the Innovation Institute at the Mass Tech Collaborative. “This marriage of market leaders in each of the critical industry segments, with an interdisciplinary team of Mass-based researchers, working at the frontiers of innovation in open cloud computing, demonstrates the significance of Massachusetts’ position in global cloud computing markets and technologies.”

The Mass Tech Collaborative awarded $3 million in seed funding in 2014, early-stage support that was critical to the creation of the MOC. In addition, industry partners have committed financial and in-kind contributions totaling more than $14 million.

Founded in 1839, Boston University is an internationally recognized institution of higher education and research.  With more than 33,000 students, it is the fourth-largest independent university in the United States.  BU consists of 17 schools and colleges, along with a number of multi-disciplinary centers and institutes integral to the University’s research and teaching mission.  In 2012, BU joined the Association of American Universities (AAU), a consortium of 62 leading research universities in the United States and Canada.