By Hugh Brock, Director, Red Hat Research, and Heidi Picher Dempsey, Research and Innovation Director, North America, Red Hat Research
We are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2023 Red Hat Collaboratory Research Incubation Awards. The awards are part of a joint effort between Red Hat and Boston University (BU) aimed at recognizing, supporting and funding research in cloud computing, and advancing the state of the art in open source technologies such as distributed systems, security, operating systems, and networking. This year, nearly $2.2 million was awarded to 19 projects, in addition to continuing support for the multi-year AI for Cloud Ops project.
These projects represent the latest accomplishments to emerge as a result of Red Hat’s partnership with Boston University — a list that includes ChRIS, an open source framework enabling healthcare organizations to protect data while benefiting from public cloud processing capabilities, and a highly successfully deployment of Red Hat OpenShift Data Science and Red Hat OpenShift for teaching, composing and maintaining open source textbooks, and scaling available education resources.
We’re especially excited about the new opportunities these projects will create for Red Hatters and BU researchers to engage with one another. Red Hat engineers offer real-world experience and know-how to academic projects, while also benefiting from the opportunity to work with experimental technologies at the extreme cutting edge. Many of these projects also cross into other scientific disciplines and into education, where applying computing power in new ways can have significant benefits for society. We’re looking forward to bringing many more students, researchers, and engineers into this work in 2023.
Eleven of the projects receiving funding this year are new to the Collaboratory, while eight are renewals for promising projects that received initial funding through the Incubation Awards in 2022. These are the new projects:
- Improving Cybersecurity Operations Using Knowledge Graphs, David Starobinski (BU), David Sastre Medina (Red Hat)
Goal: Improve the workflow and performance of security operations centers, including automating several of their tasks, by leveraging the vast amount of structured and unstructured real-world data available on threats, attacks, and mitigation
- Relational Memory Controller, Manos Athanassoulis (BU), Renato Mancuso (BU), Ulrich Drepper (Red Hat), Ahmed Sanaullah (Red Hat)
Goal: Enable the integration of the Relational Memory Engine (RME), an FPGA-based engine for transforming data in hardware, with a memory controller
- Toward on-the-Fly Reorganization of High-Order Data Objects, Renato Mancuso (BU), Manos Athanassoulis (BU), Ulrich Drepper (Red Hat), Ahmed Sanaullah (Red Hat)
Goal: Investigate the design and development of on-the-fly data reorganization engines to make the benefits of RME available to a wider set of applications, such as image manipulation, machine, learning, and tensor analysis
- HySe: Hypervisor Security Through Component-Wise Fuzzing, Manuel Egele (BU), Bandan Das (Red Hat)
Goal: Design, implement, and evaluate program analysis capabilities that allow the preemptive identification of bugs and vulnerabilities in hypervisor components that use interfaces identified as exposed to potential attackers
- Prototyping a Distributed, Asynchronous Workflow for Iterative Near-Term Ecological Forecasting, Michael Dietze (BU), Christopher Tate (Red Hat), Yannis Paschalidis (BU)
Goal: Prototype an accessible community infrastructure to generate ecological forecasts at scale, focusing on the development of a cloud-native workflow that can handle an asynchronous, event-driven, distributed approach to execution
- Co-Ops: Collaborative Open-Source and Privacy-Preserving Training for Learning to Drive Anywhere, Eshed Ohn-Bar (BU), Adam Smith (BU), Erik Erlandson (Red Hat), Michael Clifford (Red Hat), Lance Galletti (Red Hat), Sanjay Arora (Red Hat)
Goal: Develop a set of open source, Red Hat-integrated tools for efficiently and flexibility facilitating diverse and modular collaboration when training AI models for autonomous driving at scale, emphasizing privacy-preserving knowledge sharing
- Minimal Mobile Systems via Cloud-Based Adaptive Task Processing, Eshed Ohn-Bar (BU), Renato Mancuso (BU), Sanjay Arora (Red Hat)
Goal: Build an efficient cloud-robot distributed computing platform for automatic offloading of computationally intensive tasks to the cloud, improving performance and making low-cost, cloud-enabled robots accessible for a significantly larger set of users
- Privacy-Preserving, Automated Operational Data Sharing Telemetry Framework, Alan Liu (BU)
Goal: Develop an open source automated tracing system to collect, process, and anonymize operational data, focusing on identifying and testing privacy preservation models
- Open Source Infrastructure for Secure Educational Data Management to Optimize Treatment and Identification of Students with Learning Disabilities, Hank Fien (BU), Eshed Ohn-Bar (BU), Ola Ozernov-Palchik (BU), Kasey Tenggren (BU), Catherine Chan-Tse (Red Hat), Sam Lindberg (Red Hat)
Goal: Develop a distributed infrastructure to process, store, analyze, and redistribute educational data that addresses privacy and security requirements for research on literacy-based disabilities
- Learned Cost-Models for Robust Tuning, Manos Athanassoulis (BU), Evimaria Terzi (BU), Harshal Chaudhari (Etsy)
Goal: Tuning database performance in the presence of uncertain load. Specifically RocksDB, but relevant for other distributed database implementations
- FHELib: Fully Homomorphic Encryption Hardware Library for Privacy-Preserving Computing, Ajay Joshi (BU)
Goal: Evaluate different schemes for FHE [Brakerski-Gentry-Vaikuntanathan (BGV), Brakerski/Fan-Vercauteren (B/FV),Cheon-Kim-Kim-Song (CKKS)] for use in an FHE hardware accelerator
Congratulations to the research teams behind all the new and renewed projects. We look forward to breaking new ground together. We anticipate sharing many intriguing and potentially transformational developments over the coming months, both from Collaboratory research and other Red Hat-supported research projects worldwide. Stay in the loop with a free subscription to Red Hat Research Quarterly and by following this blog. You can also explore all of our projects and events and find ways to get involved at research.redhat.com. Contact Jen Stacy, Senior Project Manager with Red Hat Research, for more information.
