Research in an Open Cloud

Abstract

While cloud computing is transforming society, today's public clouds are black boxes, implemented and operated by a single provider that makes all business and technology decisions. Can we architect a cloud that enables a broad industry and research community to participate in the business and technology innovation? Do we really need to blindly trust the provider for the security of our data and computation? Can we expose rich operational data to enable research and to help guild users of the cloud? The Mass Open Cloud (MOC) is a public cloud project based on alternative marketplace-driven model of a public cloud - that of an Open Cloud eXchange (OCX) - where many stakeholders (including the research community) participate in implementing and operating an open cloud. Our vision to to create an ecosystem that brings the innovation of a broader community to bear on a healthier and more efficient cloud marketplace, where anyone can standup up a new hardware or software service, and users can make informed choice between them. The OCX model effectively turns the cloud into a production-scale laboratory for cloud research and innovation. The MOC is a collaboration between the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Universities (Boston University, Northeastern, MIT, Harvard and UMass), and Industry (Red Hat, Cisco, Intel, Lenovo, Netapp and TwoSigma). In this talk I will give an overview of the vision of this project, discuss some of the recent exciting developments and some of the different research projects taking place within or being enabled by the MOC.

Bio

Orran Krieger is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Boston University, PI on the Mass Open Cloud, Resident Fellow of the Hariri Institute for Computing, and Director of the Red Hat Collaboratory at Boston University. Before coming to BU, he spent five years at VMware starting and working on vCloud. Prior to that he was a researcher and manager at IBM T. J. Watson, leading the Advanced Operating System Research Department. Orran did his PhD and MASc in Electrical Engineering at the University of Toronto.