BU to Hit Cloud Computing with Their Open Cloud Platform

By CIOReview | Tuesday, April 29, 2014

BOSTON, MA: Boston University has raised the curtains over their plans for developing an open cloud platform Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) over the next three years targeting academic researchers, corporations and others.

With the governor of Massachusetts pledging $3 million in state support the overall funding for the project has reached 13 million, reported Rich Barlow for BU Today. The announcement was made at Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) in Holyoke by Azer Bestavros, Director of BU’s Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering.

The MOC, which is the brain child of a 2009 research paper is intended to be an open and public cloud platform where anyone can purchase computing power, may it be multiple vendors of software or hardware or other computer services. All the clients would have access to operational data on the MOC regarding the programs run, performance and other issues.

Orran Krieger, Director of the Cloud Computing Initiative at the Hariri Institute says that so far no such cloud platform exists but if the program is successful it will be widely followed by transforming the very nature of cloud computing.

Bestavros compares the platform to a shopping mall, where MGHPCC will be the physical mall and MOC’s corporate partners would be the stores, selling products and services at the Holyoke center. According to him, this collective platform will draw traffic and leverage economies of scale. Bestavros along with Krieger, the co author of the thesis, argues that this is more secure and will put an end to sneaking by intelligence agencies.

Besides, the participating universities like Harvard, MOC also partners with tech firms like Red Hat, Cisco, EMC, Juniper Networks, Cambridge Computer Services, DataDirect Networks to name a few.