Red Hat and Boston University Announce Red Hat Collaboratory Research Incubation Award Recipients

Those attending Red Hat Summit this past April heard Red Hat CEO Paul Cormier announce our partnership with Boston University, which included expanding the Red Hat Collaboratory to drive innovative research and education in open source technology. Today, I’m very excited to share the inaugural recipients of the Red Hat Collaboratory Research Incubation Award. 

This joint effort to advance research in the layers of the cloud computing ecosystem aims to fund open source projects focused on distributed, operating, security or network systems. The Red Hat Collaboratory has awarded more than $2.3 million to 16 projects across the hybrid cloud space. We see each project as an invigorating opportunity for BU faculty, students, Red Hat researchers, and industry partners to make practical innovations in open source.

AI for Cloud Ops, the Red Hat Collaboratory Research Incubation Award headline project, will receive $1 million over two years and focus on the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud systems. Red Hatters Steven Huels, Marcel Hild, and Daniel Riek will work alongside BU faculty Ayse Coskun, Alan Liu, and Gianluca Stringhini, a group of BU graduate students and IBM researcher Fabio Oliviera to create new methods for intelligent data collection, fusing and representing systems data to enable AI-based analytics and build, apply and scale AI frameworks to improve performance, management, security, compliance and resilience in the cloud.

As co-director of the Red Hat Collaboratory, I am especially passionate about AI for Cloud Ops because its scale is markedly different from what we have done before. For the first time, we’re able to support a team of this size composed of students, faculty and engineers working side-by-side towards a common goal to benefit operations teams and enterprises of all sizes. Red Hat is excited to help data centers that have struggled to maintain a dedicated staff to keep pace with the rapid advancements in technology, and through AI for Cloud Ops, we believe that these organizations can benefit from the efficiencies derived from larger enterprises’ data. 

Other projects funded through the Red Hat Collaboratory Research Incubation Award include:

• Creating a Global Open Research Platform to Better Understand Social Sustainability Using Data from a Real-Life Smart Village, Christos Cassandras (BU), Vasiliki Kalavri (BU), John Liagouris (BU), Mayank Varia (BU), Alexandra Machado (Red Hat), Jim Craig (Red Hat), and Christopher Tate (Red Hat)

• DISL: A Dynamic Infrastructure Services Layer for Reconfigurable Hardware, Martin Herbordt (BU), Uli Drepper (Red Hat), and Ahmed Sanaullah (Red Hat)

• Towards High Performance and Energy Efficiency in Open Source Stream Processing, Vasiliki Kalavri (BU), Jonathan Appavoo (BU), and Sanjay Arora (Red Hat)

• Near-Data Data Transformation, Manos Athanassoulis (BU), Renato Mancuso (BU), Uli Drepper (Red Hat), and Ahmed Sanaullah (Red Hat)

• Practical Programming of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) with Open Source Tools, Martin Herbordt (BU), Uli Drepper (Red Hat), and Ahmed Sanaullah (Red Hat)

• Symbiotes: A New Step in Linux’s Evolution, Jonathan Appavoo (BU) 

• Foundations in Open Source Education, Jonathan Appavoo (BU) 

• Linux Computational Caching, Jonathan Appavoo (BU)

• Robust Data Systems Tuning, Manos Athanassoulis (BU) and Evimaria Terzi (BU)

• Privacy-Preserving Cloud Computing using Homomorphic Encryption, Ajay Joshi (BU) 

• Serverless Streaming Graph Analytics, Vasiliki Kalavri (BU)

• Secure Cross-Site Analytics on OpenShift Logs, John Liagouris (BU)

• Enabling Intelligent In-Network Computing for Cloud Systems, Alan Liu (BU)

• OSMOSIS: Open Source Multi-Organizational Collaborative Training for Societal-Scale AI Systems, Eshed Ohn-Bar (BU)

• Intelligent Data Synchronization for Hybrid Clouds, David Starobinski (BU)

Stay tuned to learn more about AI for Cloud Ops and other award recipients as we keep up with their research teams at the Red Hat Collaboratory hosted within the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering at Boston University.