In 2013, with seed funding and support from the Mass Tech Collaborative, the Mass Open Cloud (MOC) was launched with a vision of creating a production cloud that would enable innovation by a broad industry and research community. Since then, the MOC has been used by thousands of students and researchers, and has become a laboratory for cloud research and innovation with tens of millions of dollars in associated research grants that have resulted in contributions to open source software and hundreds of publications.
Since then, a number of interrelated projects have grown around the Mass Open Cloud (MOC) and the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC), a 90,000 square foot 15 megawatt LEED certified data center, owned and operated by the same five universities (Boston University, Harvard University, Northeastern University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Massachusetts) involved in the MOC.
As these projects grew, so too did the interest from research and industry organizations. This interest resulted in partnerships that increased the technological, financial, and operational abilities of the MOC. The list of partners has continued to expand, and now encomposses academic, non-profit, institutional, industry, and community involvement.
In the Spring of 2020, the MOC Alliance (formerly known as the Open Research Cloud Initiative) was announced and the Mass Open Cloud workshop was rebranded as the Open Cloud Workshop. The MOC Alliance acts as a forum for the different projects to interact and coordinate with monthly meetings of stakeholders, special interest groups, and regular working groups.
Ultimately, the purpose of the MOC Alliance is to encourage the kind of rich interactions between research, development, and production that has been so valuable for today’s public clouds, doing so in an open fashion that engages a broad community of academic researchers and open source developers.