2024 MOC Alliance Workshop
The is a Red Hat Research partner event. Please visit the 2024 MOC Alliance event page for the latest information.
The MOC Alliance provides a structure for a set of interrelated projects that have grown up around the Mass Open Cloud (MOC) and Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC). These projects include production cloud services (NERC, NESE, OSN) for domain researchers that are operated and facilitated by university research IT, a national testbed for cloud research (OCT), projects to enable scientific and medical researchers (Biogrids, ChRiS), projects to engage the open source (OI labs, Operate First) and systems research (Red Hat Collaboratory, i-Scale) communities.
The workshop will bring together our unique community of Research IT, researchers, users, and industry to celebrate what has been accomplished and help define the MOC Alliance strategy moving forward. In addition, it will showcase how the Alliance is so much more than the sum of its parts. Sessions will cover research that was motivated by experience with a real cloud, the impact research has already had on upstream open source projects, and how some of these projects are starting to impact services that are part of the Alliance.
Travel details can be found below. This page will be updated with new details as we get closer to the event, so make sure to check back for exciting announcements!
Agenda
Wednesday, February 28
Morning—Session 1: AI and the AI Alliance
AI is expected to be one of the most demanding uses of the MOC in the near term, with the emergence of the AI Alliance, the huge demand from existing users, and NAIRR on the horizon. This session is intended to kick off the discussion on AI and help identify the role that the MOC Alliance can play in supporting AI users and the AI Alliance, but all four sessions will also touch on how the MOC Alliance will focus on AI in the next year.
Afternoon—Session 2: Marriage of Data and Compute
There is an enormous opportunity for a cloud that is focused on research and education to take advantage of the interaction between data/storage and compute in a way that is different from today’s public clouds. This session will review our status on NESE, Dataverse and related capabilities, and discuss how we can do better on taking advantage of the relationship between data and compute to aid scientists using the cloud and improve the utilization of the cloud infrastructure. While an important theme here is AI, this more generally applies to all research domains.
Thursday, February 29
Morning—Session 3: Open Cloud
The MOC Alliance has been developing a new vision for an open cloud to enable different groups to stand up cloud services in a level playing field, services can grow or shrink based on demand, system researchers and developers can discover the issues and develop new services, and multiple data centers can participate in the cloud. These capabilities are increasingly important as we look forward to expanding the MOC to address the needs of AI Alliance and NAIRR. This session will discuss the status of what we have, the challenges we need to address, and help focus our community on these issues.
Afternoon—Session 4: Operations and Discussions
The MOC Alliance has many non-technical components that are also essential to our vision of an open cloud. The topic of operations includes education, support for systems research, user outreach and facilitation, and governance and partnerships. This session will include discussion led by some of our presenters including the operations topics as well as our other major topics of AI, Marriage of Data and Compute, and Open Cloud to allow our community to connect and provide feedback in real time.
Location and Travel
Boston University George Sherman Union (2nd floor ballroom)
775 Commonwealth Ave
Boston, MA 02215
Accessible by the MBTA Green Line – “B” Line to Boston College, get off at Boston University Central.
Paid parking available at 766 Commonwealth Ave.