Hariri Hosts Second Annual Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) Workshop

On December 6th-7th, the Hariri Institute for Computing hosted the second annual Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) Workshop. Built upon a unique academic, industry, and government partnership, the MOC is comprised of deeply interconnected projects with the same goal: to develop an open, production-quality cloud computing system that enables research and provides leading-edge services for scientific computing.

This year’s two-day workshop built off of a successful event last year and included enhanced partner engagement and participation from new attendees. The agenda featured a combination of short micro talks, networking breaks, working groups, a poster session, and a core industry partner roundtable. MOC principal investigator, Orran Krieger; Hariri Institute Founding Director, Azer Bestavros; and more than 20 BU faculty, students, postdoctoral researchers, and members of the MOC technical team gave presentations. The event drew more than 140 participants representing the core industry partners (Brocade, Cisco, Intel, Lenovo, Red Hat, and Two Sigma), government partners, faculty, students, and research IT.  Approximately two-thirds of the workshop attendees were first-time participants, and over 35 of the participants were students.

One of the key MOC government partners, the United States Air Force, was represented by seven attendees. USAF CTO, Tim Rudolph, noted his excitement about deepening their existing partnership, pointing to the tremendous value that their work with the MOC has added to USAF research. Event components built on one another to create intriguing dialogue about the achievements and potential development of the MOC. Throughout the workshop, seven successful working groups created compelling cases to extend the conversation further along specific research thrusts of the MOC.

The MOC is funded by a $3M Commonwealth of Massachusetts MassTech Collaborative Matching Grant Award, and with more than $16M of matching grants from key industry participants. The project is housed at BU’s Cloud Computing Initiative, which is part of the Hariri Institute for Computing.