Bostonia: MOC Pioneering a Cloud Mall
With Massachusetts pledging $3 million in state support, BU leaders in April announced plans for development of a path-breaking computing cloud that could spur economic growth and technology innovation.
The plan calls for hosting the MOC at the MGHPCC data center, where it would tap the computational power of BU and its MOC partners, who have jointly contributed $16 million to MGHPCC, leveraging the $3 million matching grant from the state. Besides the participating universities, MOC partners are tech firms Red Hat, Cisco, EMC, Juniper Networks, SGI, Mellanox, Plexxi, Riverbed, Enterprise DB, Cambridge Computer Services, and DataDirect Networks.
The MOC concept of a cloud marketplace grew out of BU research in 2009. In a recent paper, Bestavros and Krieger argue that closed clouds usually have a single provider, who “alone has access to the operational data.” For this and other reasons, they write, “in the long run, if only a handful of major providers continue to dominate the public cloud marketplace, then any innovation can only be realized through one of them.”
With a cloud designed like the MOC, their paper says, “many stakeholders, rather than just a single provider, participate in implementing and operating the cloud. This creates a multisided marketplace in which participants freely cooperate and compete with each other, and customers can choose among numerous competing services and solutions.”
Another advantage: an open cloud would be more secure than a closed one, Bestavros and Krieger say. It is “the best way to make sure that software is clean,” according to Bestavros, especially as American tech companies complain that federal computer snooping might scare off billions of dollars’ worth of cloud computing customers. With a public, open cloud like the MOC, “the National Security Agency cannot put backdoors in an open-source code, because you can see what the software is doing,” he says.