The Collaboratory solicited proposals from BU faculty for both large and small research projects to drive innovation for the open hybrid cloud.

The Red Hat Collaboratory at Boston University has moved into a new phase of identifying and funding promising research projects, and the selection process is currently underway. The submission deadline was October 1, 2021, and final award announcements will be made December 15, 2021.

The purpose of the Collaboratory is to connect BU faculty and students with industry engineers working in open source communities. These awards will provide both substantial financial support and the support of Red Hat engineers to the winning proposals.

Projects are expected to focus on problems of distributed, operating, security, or network systems whose solution shows promise for advancing their field and impacting industry. Software developed in the course of this research must be made available under an open source license, and all results will be made publicly available. 

The Collaboratory will fund projects at three levels: large (< $500K per year), involving multiple faculty and students; small (< $150K); and speculative (< $75K).  Large-scale projects are expected to be highly visible, and will be affiliated with a specific Red Hat business unit, which will provide additional resources. Small-scale projects will focus on an individual researcher’s area of expertise and will include collaboration with at least one Red Hat engineer. Speculative projects may include fundamental systems research, work relevant to the Open Research Cloud Initiative, and high-risk projects. Researchers of speculative projects do not need to have the committed involvement of a Red Hat engineer, but initiating university-industry collaboration through these projects remains a priority.

Projects have a timeline of one to two years, depending on scale, and are renewable annually after the award period ends. The Collaboratory’s goal is to encourage multi-year projects while making sure that they continue to progress and providing support to projects that are running into problems. 

BU researchers and Red Hat technical experts will review applications, making selections based on feasibility, potential visibility, potential impact, novelty, contribution to diversity in Collaboratory research, and relevance to the Collaboratory and its infrastructure, all within the context of the proposed budget.

As part of its planned growth, the Collaboratory looks to fund two large-scale projects, six small-scale projects, and six speculative projects annually.