“Do what excites you, and good things will happen”

BY GINA MANTICA

Orran Krieger’s career has focused on solving challenging computing problems that impact society. Nearly ten years after he first had the idea for creating a truly “open” production cloud, Krieger’s vision has transformed into reality:  a community of researchers, engineers, and information technology (IT) professionals are all working together to accelerate the pace of discovery and innovation in an open production research-focused cloud as part of the Mass Open Cloud (MOC) Alliance.

As Director of the MOC Alliance, and Co-Director of the associated $20M Red Hat Collaboratory, both housed within the Hariri Institute, Krieger gets to combine his interest in igniting collaborations with his system building and industry experience. The MOC Alliance has become a place where talented individuals, institutions, and companies can collaborate in a way that enables rapid open-source innovation impacting real users. 

Krieger says he was a terrible student as a kid due to undiagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and dyslexia, but he was always strong at logic and programming came easily. He followed in the footsteps of his father to become a computer engineer, and eventually pursued a PhD at the University of Toronto. In Toronto, Krieger had the opportunity to participate in a multi-faculty project to design a new computer that required a fundamentally different operating system — the kind of large, collaborative computer system projects that now define his career.  

Since graduating, Krieger has pursued projects rather than jobs. He moved between academia and industry to build what he thought was exciting and important. Krieger joined IBM when he had the opportunity to build a team to develop what became K42, an operating system for future 64-bit non-uniform memory access (NUMA) multiprocessors; such systems are now ubiquitous. The project resulted in a large number of publications that have had an increasing influence on computing and technology.  In addition, Krieger’s team at IBM played a key role in a whole series of systems and technologies that have had a broad impact on society, including Linux, the Playstation 3, Xen, unikernels, hypervisors and the cloud.  He eventually moved to VMWare to start their cloud computing division. “My advice to students looking for jobs is to find a place where you can do what excites you, and good things will happen,” says Krieger, a Professor of Engineering at BU.

In 2014 Krieger joined Jonathan Appavoo, his long term collaborator and an Associate Professor of Computer Science at BU, to build a new model of operating systems better suited for the cloud. Soon after joining, he was inspired by the creation of the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC), an intercollegiate high-performance computing facility, to start thinking about a new model of cloud. “I thought that the MGHPCC was a place to do cloud the way that cloud should be done. The cloud is the future of computing, and today it is incredibly difficult for anyone outside of a few large companies to work on the complicated problems or even know what they are,” says Krieger. Krieger, together with Peter Desnoyers, an Associate Professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, kicked off the Mass Open Cloud (MOC), which eventually led to today’s MOC Alliance – a partnership with  a growing body of academic institutions, industry partners, and other organizations working together on an open cloud.

“I wanted to create a place where there could be an open cloud enabling many different players to participate. In the long run, open systems enable much faster innovation,” says Krieger, 

In addition to overseeing the growth of the MOC Alliance, Krieger continues to pursue research in cloud storage and operating systems in partnership with industry, partnering with multiple companies, including Red Hat. Krieger teams up with Desnoyers as part of a research team that investigates new approaches for storing data in the cloud that balance cost, mobility, and speed. He also works with Appavoo in a research group that explores fundamental operating system innovation.

With his big ideas and the support of his collaborators in the MOC Alliance, Krieger believes that open-source software can evolve at scale rapidly and reach hundreds of thousands of cloud users across Massachusetts. Krieger hopes the MOC Alliance will be replicated and federated by other universities, creating a world-wide open cloud. “I am lucky to bring together a team that can do things that I can’t. We are going to be an engine that drives this model to move across the world,” says Krieger. 

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