Open Infrastructure Foundation Welcomes Six New Associate Members

AUSTIN, Texas, Feb. 16, 2022 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- The Open Infrastructure (OpenInfra) Foundation today announced six new members of its Associate Member category: ARDC (Nectar Cloud), Oregon State University, Monash University, Open Source Initiative, Telecom Paris and University of Massachusetts Amherst.

This Associate category of Foundation members was added by the OpenInfra Foundation board in 2021 to recognize and collaborate more closely with academic and public research institutions and non-profit organizations that use, build or sustain open infrastructure. Check out the full list of participating organizations and learn how your organization can join to support the global OpenInfra community.

The Australian Research Data Commons
The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) enables the Australian research community and industry access to nationally significant, data-intensive digital research infrastructure, platforms, skills and collections of high quality data. The ARDC Nectar Research Cloud provides researchers with self-service access to large-scale computing infrastructure, supporting a wide range of research workloads from thousands of projects in all major research areas.

"The ARDC Nectar Research Cloud pioneered OpenStack for Australian research computing and was the first to federate and scale nationally. After 10 years, the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud is still a vital and impactful resource for researchers," said Carmel Walsh, ARDC's director of eResearch Infrastructure and Services. "Engagement with the Open Infrastructure community has been crucial to the success of the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud, and we are excited to become an Associate Member of the OpenInfra Foundation."

Monash University
Monash is a modern, global, research-intensive university, delivering education and research excellence in Australia and across the Indo-Pacific. Universities are living laboratories for research-driven infrastructure. They require perpetual and bespoke computing at scale, which when combined, are the killer app for open source infrastructure, the associated communities and their practices.

"Monash University has participated in the Open Infrastructure community since 2013, with a distinct user perspective—we are a living laboratory of research-driven use cases from all research domains," said Steve Quenette, deputy director of the Monash eResearch Centre. "Open source and in particular the OpenInfra ecosystem is the language by which we craft HPC, highly sensitive, cloud and research data instruments at scale in a way that is closer to research needs, and with access mechanisms that are closer to research practice. We look forward to continued sharing of learnings with the community and pioneering of digital research infrastructure."

Open Source Initiative
For over 20 years the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has worked to raise awareness and adoption of open source software and build bridges between open source communities of practice. As a global non-profit, the OSI champions software freedom in society through education, collaboration, and infrastructure, stewarding the Open Source Definition (OSD), and preventing abuse of the ideals and ethos inherent to the open source movement.

"The Open Infrastructure Foundation through its adherence to The Four Opens is an exemplar for practicing collaborative software innovation upon a framework of open source licensing," said Stefano Maffulli, executive director of the Open Source Initiative. "As a champion of software freedom and steward of the Open Source Definition, the Open Source Initiative is particularly proud of and grateful to the OpenInfra Foundation for all that it is doing to help the open source software community make real progress. Becoming an Associate Member is our privilege, and the OSI looks forward to working in concert with OIF to help build the software that powers humanity."

Oregon State University
The Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) provides infrastructure hosting and services for over 200 free and open source projects. The OSUOSL uses OpenStack to provide developer access to the POWER and AArch64 ecosystems, which includes providing AArch64 compute resources for OpenInfra Zuul node pool. The organization also uses OpenStack to power its x86-based cloud that most of its projects use. In addition, the OSUOSL is a heavy user of and contributor to OpenStack Chef, one of the many top-level projects within OpenStack.

"Without OpenStack and the OpenInfra Foundation, the OSUOSL wouldn't have been able to scale up its service offerings to free and open source projects," said Lance Albertson, director of the OSUOSL. "The innovation within the OpenInfra Foundation has been a key factor in many of our successes in recent years. We're happy to be a part of the OpenInfra Foundation as an Associate Member!"

Télécom Paris
Télécom Paris is the leading French public higher education institution in computer science. Founded in 1878, it now hosts a faculty of 160 professors and associate professors and is a founding member of the Institut Polytechnique de Paris.

"Open Infrastructure is one of the building blocks of our future in a digital world," said Nicolas Glady, dean and president at Télécom Paris. "At Télécom Paris, we rely on this infrastructure everyday and build on it our research and teaching. By becoming an associate member, we will strengthen our bond with the community. More generally, we share the values of open source development and have made a specific objective of enabling open source as a critical public infrastructure component ensuring both technological strategic autonomy and open science."

University of Massachusetts Amherst
The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst) collaborates with the OpenInfra Foundation through the OpenInfra Labs initiative, supporting the creation of open source tools, repeatability of processes and analyses, and the evaluation of cutting-edge hardware for cloud computing. In addition, UMass Amherst administratively supports Operate First activities at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Compute Cluster and is a member of the Mass Open Cloud (MOC).

"The University of Massachusetts Amherst's membership in the OpenInfra Foundation is a natural consequence of its involvement in several compute research infrastructure activities that are centered around the Massachusetts Green High Performance Compute Center," said Michael Zink, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UMass Amherst. "Our compute research infrastructure is open to the research community and in parts to foundations and industry. We see our membership as a vehicle to contribute our knowledge, experiences and artifacts to the larger open infrastructure community and a way to benefit from the combined knowledge of the Foundation for our own projects."

OpenInfra Summit Berlin 2022
The OpenInfra community plans its return to in-person events with the 2022 Summit, to be held in Berlin, June 7-9, at the bcc Berlin Congress Center. Learn more about attendance and sponsorships: https://openinfra.dev/summit/

About the Open Infrastructure Foundation
The OpenInfra Foundation builds communities that write open source infrastructure software that runs in production. With the support of over 110,000 individuals in 187 countries, the OpenInfra Foundation hosts open source projects and communities of practice, including infrastructure for AI, container native apps, edge computing and datacenter clouds. Join the OpenInfra movement: http://www.openinfra.dev

Media Contact

Robert Cathey, Cathey Communications, 865-386-6118, [email protected]

Allison Price, Open Infrastructure Foundation, 512-827-8633, [email protected]

SOURCE Open Infrastructure Foundation