What Mass Open Cloud does

Mass Open Cloud is a non-profit university consortium that operates a production-grade open public cloud and an affiliated portfolio of research infrastructure projects, primarily serving academic researchers, students, and industry partners in New England and beyond. The organization was launched in 2013 with seed funding from the Mass Tech Collaborative and is anchored by a five-university consortium (Boston University, Harvard University, MIT, Northeastern University, and the University of Massachusetts) that jointly owns and operates the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC), a 90,000-square-foot, 15-megawatt LEED-certified data center. The MOC Alliance, formally announced in 2020 as a coordination forum, sits at Boston University's Hariri Institute for Computing and integrates numerous affiliated projects including the New England Research Cloud (NERC), Northeast Storage Exchange (NESE), Open Cloud Testbed (OCT), Open Storage Network (OSN), Biogrids, ChRIS, Red Hat Collaboratory at BU, i-Scale, OpenInfra Labs, Operate First, and Colosseum.

The core product is NERC, a production research cloud operated by BU and Harvard Research IT that provides OpenStack virtual machines, OpenShift containers, S3-compatible object storage, and Red Hat OpenShift AI (RHOAI) JupyterLab workbenches with NVIDIA H100, A100, and V100 GPU options. Services are allocated through the ColdFront resource management platform and billed on usage-based quotas, with separate subscription billing for allocated compute and storage. The platform supports generative AI/LLM workloads (including Meta LLAMA-2), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), predictive AI, and MLOps pipelines via tutorials and integration with Globus, GitLab/GitHub, and Harvard Dataverse.

The revenue model is hybrid and non-commercial: operational support derives from tens of millions of dollars in associated research grants (NSF, Massachusetts state, Mass Tech Collaborative seed funding), industry partnership contributions (Red Hat, IBM, Meta, NVIDIA, Intel, Two Sigma, QuEra), usage-based NERC quotas to academic institutions, and educational service revenue through BU's Fundamentals of Cloud Computing course. NERC is currently transitioning into a successor platform branded MOC 2.0, with a planned service pause on July 31, 2026, designed to support NIST 800-171 and HIPAA compliant workloads for regulated and sensitive research data.

Name

Mass Open Cloud

Website

https://massopen.cloud

Company type

Private

Founded year

2013

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

11–50 employees

Short description

Mass Open Cloud is a non-profit university consortium operating an open-source production research cloud and affiliated infrastructure projects, serving academic researchers, students, and industry partners across New England via NERC, MGHPCC, and a portfolio of open cloud, storage, and AI research initiatives.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Research Cloud Infrastructure

NAICS

Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services (5182)

SIC

Services-Computer Integrated Systems Design (7373), Services-Prepackaged Software (7372)

akta.pro primary industry

General-Purpose Compute (VMs & Bare Metal IaaS) (HDABAAAA)

akta.pro secondary industries

Object Storage Platforms (HDABAEAC), Cloud-Native Development (Containers, Kubernetes, Microservices) (BPAEACAD)

Keywords

• Research cloud computing
• Academic cloud services
• Open source infrastructure
• AI cloud platform
• OpenStack research cloud

Headquarters

HQ city

Boston

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Offices2 records

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Personnel, Technology or R&D, Infrastructure, Operations

Revenue model

1. Research Cloud Services: The MOC Alliance/NERC provides cloud computing services to academic researchers, institutions, and industry partners. Services include VMs, containers, GPU computing, and storage. Usage-based billing for resources with quotas managed through ColdFront allocation system.
2. Research Grants and Funding: Tens of millions of dollars in associated research grants have supported the MOC, resulting in contributions to open source software and hundreds of publications. Seed funding came from Mass Tech Collaborative. Additional funding from NSF, state investments, and industry partnerships.
3. Educational Services: The MOC Alliance supports educational programs including Boston University's Fundamentals of Cloud Computing course, providing hands-on experience with cloud technologies through semester-long capstone projects supervised by industry mentors.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion3 records

Distribution channels6 records

Marketing channels6 records

Core offering

Mass Open Cloud operates a non-profit research cloud platform providing virtual machines, containers, S3-compatible storage, and AI-as-a-service for academic researchers. The flagship offering is the New England Research Cloud (NERC), a production cloud environment built on OpenStack and OpenShift that delivers compute, GPU, and storage capacity curated for research workloads.

Product overview

The Mass Open Cloud Alliance operates a portfolio of open cloud products and affiliated research projects centered around the Mass Open Cloud (MOC), an open production cloud exchange launched in 2013. The core offering is the New England Research Cloud (NERC), a production cloud operated by BU and Harvard Research IT providing VMs (via OpenStack), containers (via OpenShift), object storage (S3-compatible), and AI-as-a-service (via Red Hat OpenShift AI/RHOAI) for research and education. This core is complemented by specialized add-on modules including NESE (Northeast Storage Exchange) and OSN (Open Storage Network) for storage at scale; OCT (Open Cloud Testbed) for cloud research experimentation; Biogrids and ChRIS for scientific and medical computing; Red Hat Collaboratory and i-Scale for academic-industry systems research; and OpenInfra Labs and OperateFirst for open source community engagement. The MOC itself is being deprecated and migrated to NERC as part of a transition to MOC 2.0.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• New England Research Cloud (NERC)

Quantifiable outcome

• Thousands of students and researchers have used the MOC since 2013
• +4 more outcomes

Named customers4 records

Segments5 records

Ideal customer profiles1 record

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

No

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration10 records

AI capability8 records

Feature4 records

Partnerships

16 partnerships are on record, tiered core, major and significant.

• Boston UniversitycoreStrategic or Co-development PartnerCo-founding university partner and primary host institution for MOC Alliance. BU houses leadership, engineering teams, and Hariri Institute for Computing. Provides research computing staff for NERC operations.
• Harvard UniversitycoreStrategic or Co-development PartnerCo-founding university partner providing research IT staff for NERC operations alongside BU. Harvard IT manages research computing services integrated with NERC.
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)coreStrategic or Co-development PartnerCo-founding university partner in the five-university consortium operating MGHPCC and MOC Alliance.
• Northeastern UniversitycoreStrategic or Co-development PartnerCo-founding university partner with Peter Desnoyers as i-scale and Co-Founding PI. Hosts Colosseum wireless emulator and multiple MOC-related research projects.
• University of MassachusettscoreStrategic or Co-development PartnerCo-founding university partner. Professor Michael Zink leads OCT (Open Cloud Testbed) PI from UMass Amherst.
• Red HatcoreStrategic or Co-development PartnerMajor industry partner through Red Hat Collaboratory at BU partnership, Red Hat Research collaboration, and OpenInfra Labs partnership with OpenStack Foundation. Red Hat engineers work with BU faculty and students on open-source software communities. Hugh Brock serves as Red Hat Research Director.
• IBMmajorStrategic or Co-development PartnerIBM and Meta launched the AI Alliance in December 2023 with MOC Alliance as founding member. IBM provides technology and research collaboration through various MOC projects including quantum computing initiatives.
• MetamajorStrategic or Co-development PartnerJoint announcement with IBM launching the AI Alliance in December 2023. MOC Alliance serves as founding member contributing to open, safe, responsible AI development.
• Open Infrastructure FoundationmajorStrategic or Co-development PartnerPartnership established OpenInfra Labs (OILabs) in collaboration with OpenStack Foundation (now Open Infrastructure Foundation). Goal to expand community and standardize open source cloud infrastructure deployment.
• IntelsignificantStrategic or Co-development PartnerIntel provides technology contributions and research collaboration. Gretchen Stewart serves as Chief Data Scientist at Intel. Intel participates in MOC workshops and collaborative research projects.
• Two SigmasignificantStrategic or Co-development PartnerIndustry partner providing support for MOC workshops and hosting industry feedback sessions. Larry Rudolph serves as Distinguished Fellow and previously as Senior Research Scientist at Two Sigma. Two Sigma participates in IUCRC industry advisory sessions.
• Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC)coreStrategic or Co-development Partner90,000 square foot 15 megawatt LEED certified data center owned and operated by the five founding universities. John Goodhue serves as Executive Director. MGHPCC received $16M for quantum computing complex deployment.
• QuEra ComputingsignificantStrategic or Co-development PartnerQuEra contributed $11 million to MGHPCC for deployment of neutral atom quantum computing complex, making quantum computing accessible to academic researchers in the open-source community.
• NVIDIAsignificantTechnology or IntegrationNVIDIA provides H100, A100, and V100 GPU technologies for NERC cloud services. GPUs enable advanced AI, machine learning, and computational research workloads.
• i-Scale (NSF IUCRC)coreStrategic or Co-development PartnerCenter for Systems Innovation at Scale - partnership between academia and industry to explore challenges of computing systems at large scale. Piotr Sliz serves as PI and Director. Funded as NSF Industry-University Cooperative Research Center.
• Boston Children's HospitalsignificantStrategic or Co-development PartnerClinical research partner using ChRIS project for medical image processing. Rudolph Pienaar serves as Staff Scientist and Professor at Harvard Medical School.

Scale indicators10 records

Recent moves7 records

Expansion highlights6 records

Broad incumbents

• Microsoft Azure: Major hyperscale public cloud with strong academic positioning through Azure for Education, Azure for Research, and OpenAI integration. Competes broadly for academic compute and AI workloads served by MOC's NERC platform.
• Amazon Web Services (AWS): Largest hyperscale public cloud offering general-purpose compute, storage, and AI/ML services. Competes broadly with NERC/MOC for academic and research workloads, with significant cloud credit programs targeting the same user base.
• IBM Cloud: Established hybrid cloud provider and co-founding partner (with Meta) of the AI Alliance that MOC Alliance joined. Overlaps with MOC in research cloud positioning, hybrid infrastructure, and AI/open-source community engagement.
• Google Cloud Platform: Major hyperscaler providing compute, storage, and AI/ML services (Vertex AI, TPUs) with substantial academic credits program. Represents a broad incumbent competing for the same AI/ML research workloads that NERC's H100 GPU service targets.

Direct peers

• Jetstream2: NSF-funded science/engineering cloud operated by Indiana University, providing OpenStack-based virtual machines and Jupyter notebooks to U.S. researchers. Directly comparable in technology stack (OpenStack), target users (academic researchers), and funding model (NSF).
• CloudBank: NSF-funded managed service providing academic researchers with streamlined access to public cloud resources (primarily AWS, GCP, Azure). Comparable in mission of democratizing cloud access for academic research and in NSF funding lineage, though it brokers commercial clouds rather than running its own.
• ACCESS-CI (formerly XSEDE): NSF-funded national cyberinfrastructure that allocates advanced computing, storage, and data resources to U.S. researchers. Closely parallels MOC's NERC and MGHPCC as federally-backed academic research compute, and serves the same target segment of academic researchers and faculty.
• Chameleon Cloud: NSF-funded experimental cloud testbed operated by the University of Chicago and TACC, providing configurable bare-metal and virtualized infrastructure for systems and computer science research. Directly comparable to MOC's Open Cloud Testbed (OCT) and NERC in mission, funding model, and user community.

Emerging players

• CoreWeave: GPU-focused cloud provider offering NVIDIA H100/A100 compute at scale for AI/ML workloads. Comparable to NERC's H100 GPU tier but as a commercial specialist emerging in the same AI compute niche MOC serves for academic researchers.
• Lambda Labs (Lambda Cloud): AI-focused cloud provider specializing in NVIDIA GPU instances (H100, A100, GH200) for ML training and inference. Represents an emerging commercial alternative in the same GPU-accelerated AI research cloud segment MOC's NERC targets.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat5 records

Key risks5 records

Key highlights7 records

Customer concentration

• YouTubeyoutube.com/@MassOpenCloudAlliance
• Facebookfacebook.com/massOpenCloud

Compliance2 records

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles1 record

Funding overview

Funding rounds

Investors

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Mass Open Cloud