Red Hat Research has periodically been fortunate to have faculty from Boston-area universities spend their sabbaticals working with our team. We’re happy to announce that in June 2024 we took this relationship to the next level by welcoming Boston University professor Orran Krieger as Director of Red Hat Research during his current sabbatical. Orran and US Director of Red Hat Research Heidi Dempsey are leading the research team on the goal of making the Mass Open Cloud (MOC) an open, distributed platform for AI/ML workloads.
Plans for the MOC
The MOC and the Mass Open Cloud (MOC) Alliance were designed to provide researchers and students access to the large-scale compute resources, large diverse data sets, AI tools, and AI models that are critical to addressing problems in healthcare, climate change, education, and many other global challenges. Housed at the Massachusetts Green High-Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC), the MOC has long been a platform facilitating collaboration among academic institutions, industry, and government, in Massachusetts and beyond.
Orran’s tenure at Red Hat Research will be focused on expanding the MOC platform ecosystem, bringing in new partners, contributors, and users with the aim of accelerating the development of open source AI technology and ensuring that open source models and tools dominate AI mindshare and marketshare. With a cost-effective reliable production cloud for AI and a proven track record of enabling broad innovation and industry participation, the MOC is well positioned to become the platform of choice for development and collaboration in open source AI.
About Orran
Orran has a history of working with one foot in the academic community and the other in industry. He is co-founder and PI of of the MOC, Founding Director for the Cloud Computing Initiative (CCI) at BU, Resident Fellow of BU’s Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, and a professor of the practice at the BU Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. In 2024 he received a Hariri Institute Community Recognition Award for innovation.
In 2017, with Red Hat Chairman (now retired) Paul Cormier, he spearheaded Boston University’s collaborative partnership with Red Hat. The ongoing partnership expanded Red Hat’s relationship with the MOC Alliance, established the Red Hat Collaboratory at BU for research incubation, and drove the creation of a Red Hat OpenShift Data Science (now Red Hat OpenShift AI) environment at BU for open source education resources.
Before coming to BU, Orran 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. If you are interested in partnering with Red Hat around the MOC-A, or would like more information, please contact Orran (okrieger@redhat.com) or Heidi (hdempsey@redhat.com).
