We have different academic collaborations and Industry Partners along with the great support from different sponsors as listed here.

Academic Collaborations

Mass Open Cloud Alliance
The MOC Alliance aims to accelerate the pace of discovery and innovation in an open production research-focused cloud. This active partnership between higher education, medical research centers, government, and industry provides structure and resources that enable close collaboration between research, development, and operations. The result of this collaboration is predictable low-cost resources and facilitator support for domain researchers, and more broadly, innovation in the public cloud.

OpenCloud Testbed
The NSF-funded Open Cloud Testbed (OCT) project will build and support a testbed for research and experimentation into new cloud platforms – the underlying software which provides cloud services to applications. Testbeds such as OCT are critical for enabling research into new cloud technologies – research that requires experiments which potentially change the operation of the cloud itself.

Northeast Storage Exchange (NESE)
NESE is the Northeast Storage Exchange, a shared regional storage collaboration funded by the National Science Foundation and operated as a long term partnership between the Universities and institutions below. Our main goals are to meet the storage needs of the data revolution for science, engineering, education and technology, particularly for researchers in the northeastern part of the U.S.

Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC)
The MGHPCC provides world-class computational infrastructure, indispensable in the increasingly sensor and data-rich environments of modern science and engineering discovery. Today, virtually no major breakthrough — be it designing a new drug, developing new materials for clean energy or addressing climate change — can take place without computation. In silico experimentation adds a powerful new dimension to knowledge discovery in all fields, alongside theory, physical experimentation and observation. With the increasingly integrated role of computation in fundamental and applied research, the MGHPCC is a critical piece of infrastructure that will continue to fuel the world-leading innovation economy of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts through cooperative research, education and outreach activities.

Industry Partners

Red Hat, Inc. (Red Hat Collaboratory)
A partnership between Red Hat and Boston University, the Red Hat Collaboratory connects BU faculty and students with industry practitioners working in open-source software communities.

The Collaboratory aims to advance research focused on emerging technologies in a number of areas including operating systems, cloud computing services, machine learning and automation, and big data platforms. It does this through:

• Sponsorship of research projects led by collaborative teams from BU and Red Hat
• Support of fellowship and internship programs for students
• Organization of joint colloquia, seminar series, and roundtables
• Engagement with other BU programs and offices

A fundamental goal of the collaboration is to develop techniques and best practices to integrate the rigor of academic research with the power of open-source innovation.

The OpenStack Foundation (Open InfraLabs)
OpenInfra Labs is a community, created by and for infrastructure providers and operators, integrating and optimizing different layers of the infrastructure, testing open source code in production, publishing complete, reproducible stacks for existing & emerging workloads, to advance open source infrastructure.

Sponsors

Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MTC)
MTC is a unique public agency, created to support the vibrant, growing innovation economy across Massachusetts.  MTC supports business formation and growth in the state’s technology sector, helping the Commonwealth lead in the global digital economy by building strategies, strengthening connections, assisting companies, making investments, and leading programs. The NERC pilot is sponsored in part by an award through MTC’s Collaborative Research Matching Grant Program.

Boston University & Harvard University
The BU Research Computing and Harvard FAS Research Computing groups have demonstrated successful collaborations and have operated a growing high-performance computing service for their institutions for over a decade and their RC facilitation teams have a rich history of engagement with each other regionally and nationally through the Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC), Campus Champions program, and the MGHPCC led Northeast Cyberteam project.  The Co-Directors function as a seamless team for the development and operation of NERC by leveraging the established framework (e.g. meetings, common tools, etc.) of existing collaborations such as MGHPCC, MOC, and NESE.

The anticipated success of NERC lies in its goal, shared by BU and Harvard, of creating scalable infrastructure and services coupled with human-driven facilitation that will be able to serve broad and diverse research domains and communities.