Massachusetts invests in open cloud project, big data

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick announced a $3 million capital investment in the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) project, a university-industry collaboration designed to create a new public cloud infrastructure to spur big data innovation.

Unlike existing proprietary public clouds, where all of the technology is controlled by a single entity, the goal of the MOC is to establish a marketplace where hardware capacity, software and services can be supplied, purchased and resold by many participants.

The MOC will provide a range of services, including infrastructure as a service, which offers on-demand access to virtual machines, as well as application development and big data platform services via the cloud.

MOC is hosted at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center in Holyoke.

The MOC project is a collaboration that draws from all five MGHPCC universities, including overall project leadership from Boston University, operational leadership from Harvard University, development from Northeastern University, community building from MIT and related research by faculty from the University of Massachusetts, Boston University, Northeastern University, Harvard University and MIT.

Industry partners, including Cisco, EMC, SGI, Red Hat, Juniper, Canonical, Dell, Intel, Mellanox, Brocade, DataDirect Networks, Mathworks, Plexxi, Cambridge Computer Services, Enterprise DB and Riverbed are contributing engineering and operational talent, equipment, financial support and business guidance. The hardware platform for the Massachusetts Open Cloud will be housed at the MGHPCC.

Gov. Patrick also announced the 2014 Mass Big Data Report, which confirms the continued growth and competitiveness of the commonwealth’s big data industry.

“Massachusetts’ competitive edge lies in our exceptional academic institutions, cutting-edge private companies, highly-skilled workforce and above all our willingness to work together to address the increasing demand for big data solutions,” said Governor Patrick.

Overall, the report finds that the global big data market is expected to top $48 billion by 2017, up from $11.6 billion in 2012. While hardware and services are expected to continue to account for the greatest share of revenue, the fastest growing sector is likely to be in big data-enabled applications.

For Massachusetts, big data applications in healthcare, life sciences and financial services appear highly promising, and local firms are seeking to fill as many as 3,000 big data-related jobs in the region over the next 12 months.