OpenInfra Labs: An Open Infrastructure Collaboration for Research Use Cases

In early March—at what turned out to be one of the last non-virtual technology events held before Coronavirus lockdowns ended in-person conferences—I was fortunate to be among more than 200 attendees who gathered for two days in Boston at the Open Cloud Workshop to discuss the intersection of academic research and cloud computing software.

The workshop is hosted by Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC), a name that will be familiar to those who have attended OpenStack and Open Infrastructure Summits over the past few years. MOC is a consortium of universities in the New England area that share computing resources, data sets and operational practices. MOC equips its members with virtual resource sharing and on-demand user provisioning through high-bandwidth connections, all built upon OpenStack and driven by OpenStack APIs. Collectively, the members of MOC are active contributors to the OpenStack community and have delivered several Summit presentations, including in Atlanta (MOC Overview and Lessons Learned), Boston and Berlin.

Another great outcome of MOC’s involvement in the OpenStack community is a new initiative called OpenInfra Labs. OpenInfra Labs is a community created by and for academic and research cloud operators who are testing open source code in production and publishing complete, reproducible stacks for existing and emerging research workloads.

The primary objective of OpenInfra Labs is to deliver open source tools to run cloud, container, AI, machine learning and edge workloads repeatedly and predictably.

OpenInfra Labs focuses on three core activities:

Integrated testing of all the components necessary to provide a complete use case
Documentation of operational and functional gaps required to run upstream projects in a production environment
Shared code repositories for operational tooling and the “glue” code that is often written independently by users

The OpenInfra Labs community was initiated by MOC, the OSF, and Red Hat. It has since welcomed a host of additional core industry partners and contributors who are interested not only in supporting academic research but also in knowledge transfer to help enterprises develop reliable and powerful federated computing resources.

Learn More about OpenInfra Labs

To learn more, check out the April 28 meeting of the OpenStack Scientific SIG, which featured an introduction to OpenInfra Labs.

If you are interested in building infrastructure for university or research purposes or represent an ecosystem vendor who would like to contribute to OpenInfra Labs, here are three ways to get involved: