We were pleased to participate in the Open Cloud 2020 Workshop that took place March 2 and 3 at Boston University.  The workshop was organized and hosted by Orran Krieger and others involved in  the Mass Open Cloud initiative.  There was a rich assortment of presentations, panels, and workshops presented by researchers and others involved in the MOC and related initiatives from academia, companies like Red Hat, and government organizations.

Of particular relevance to us was the presentation about the new New England Research Cloud, a production-ready open cloud upon which a range of applications used in research will be made available to researchers in New England and elsewhere.  The NERC project was presented by Scott Yockel, Director of Research Computing at Harvard FAS, and Wayne Gilmore, Director of the Research Computing Services Group at Boston University, who are leading the project.

The RSpace presentation centered around plans for RSpace and Harvard Dataverse to be deployed as pilot applications on the NERC, and of the benefits of joint deployment and use of these and other inter-operable research applications in this context and as part of a data commons like the Harvard Data Commons, which was presented by Merce Crosas of Harvard.  These benefits include enhanced synergies between the applications, streamlining multi-campus collaborations, and new possibilities opened up by having the applications local to the data center where storage and compute are located.