In research, building on the shoulders of others has long meant referencing the contributions of past papers. However, increasingly research-led data & (and the focus here…) tools are more impactful contributions.
To this end, and after nearly a decade in the making, the eResearch Centre has joined the Open Infrastructure Foundation as an associate member. See the announcement here.
Universities are living laboratories for research-driven infrastructure. They require perpetual & bespoke computing at scale, which when combined, are the killer app for #opensource infrastructure, the associated communities and their practices.
“Monash University has long believed in the power of using open source solutions to provide infrastructure for research, so it is with great pleasure that we formalize our long relationship and welcome them as a new associate member.”
Thierry Carrez, vice president of engineering at the OpenInfra Foundation, partnership announcement
Over the last decade open data and open source software have established legal entities (foundations) to ensure priorities, quality and sustainability of the data/tool are managed at commercial / real-world levels. Our partnership Open Infrastructure Foundation helps our researchers access tools for their own digital instruments that are in-turn produced, curated and maintained at the rate of global cloud development (across all industries). In this regard we’re amongst a pioneering set of institutions including CERN, Boston University and others. We give back by ensuring our research workloads are driving the community and infrastructure, pushing new technologies and expectations through the ecosystem.
“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 is closer to research practice. We look forward to continued sharing of learnings with the community and pioneering of digital research infrastructure.”
Steve Quenette, Deputy Director of the Monash eResearch Centre, partnership announcement
To provide some indication of impact – 0.5 billion users (including our ~1000 research CIs) using 1.8m servers / 8.4m virtual machines and 4.5m public IP addresses benefit every contribution made by the global community. (From 2020 survey, which is certainly under-reported)
This article can also be found, published created commons here 1