MOC Helps Increase Cloud Computing Popularity
As governments across the country are beginning to embrace cloud computing, Boston University’s Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) project is recognized for its potential.
Initiatives like the MOC hope to spur public-private sector innovation by creating a marketplace for customized infrastructure and platform services. Led by Boston University in collaboration with other area universities, including Harvard, MIT, and Northeastern, the goal is to create a shared infrastructure that will allow researchers, government agencies and industry to create cloud-based, data-driven innovations. Azer Bestavros, director of the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering at Boston University, says, “Just as a shopping mall provides a shared infrastructure and amenities for a variety of retailers, the MOC creates a marketplace where developers can innovate services for many different customers, from research institutions, healthcare providers, government agencies and non-profits as well as for profit organizations, and taxpayers are the beneficiary.” To date, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has provided $3 million to fund the initiative, and matching funds from a mix of federal, industry and philanthropic sources are expected to exceed $20 million.
Bestavros believes we’re just at the beginning. He points to work being done between the MOC and Children’s Hospital. Clinicians there have long wanted the ability to conduct fetal MRI, something that until the advent of open cloud super-computing resources, was prohibitively complicated and expensive. That project is now in development.