The results of the research will be made available to the open-source community in order to accelerate AI adoption and innovation in the Hybrid Cloud.
IBM and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), one of the premier academic research institutions in India, have announced the launch of the IBM-IISc Hybrid Cloud lab to advance research in hybrid cloud technologies and drive breakthrough innovations in this area. Students and teachers from several departments at the IISc campus in Bengaluru will collaborate with IBM Research scientists.
The value gained from a hybrid, multi-cloud platform technology and operating model at scale is 2.5 times the value derived from a single platform, single cloud, according to an IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) research on hybrid cloud. As a result, companies are spending more in hybrid multi-cloud platform capabilities to generate value and drive business transformation.
The IBM-IISc Hybrid Cloud lab will bring together a brilliant community of scientists, teachers, and students who are dedicated to addressing some of the most difficult research issues that businesses face today, such as growing cloud computing usage across sectors. The lab will collaborate not just with academics, but also with the larger open-source community for wider adoption and acceleration of innovation. The lab will begin with a series of initiatives combining academics and students from the IISc Departments of Computational and Data Sciences, Computer Science and Automation, and Supercomputing Education and Research Center, as well as scientists from IBM Research’s India lab on several areas including:
- Building self-healing computer systems that utilise artificial intelligence to detect upcoming difficulties, diagnose and fix defects while optimising availability and lowering operational costs.
- Microservices adoption and cloud-native application optimization that leverages and advances cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes and serverless. This will allow businesses to significantly increase the agility of their IT services and develop new cloud-based business models.
- Developing AI-based Information Management that allows businesses to control, consume, derive insights from, and create value from data across a hybrid footprint of edge, cloud, and many data sources.
- Using developments in AI for Code to model and optimise computer systems by developing AI systems that can evaluate human and machine languages. This will be fundamental to enabling innovations and automation in the above-mentioned areas.
The lab will take an open access strategy by collaboratively presenting research findings in premier conferences, holding seminars, and distributing open-source information to the community, in addition to IBM’s commitment to encourage innovations that allow quicker adoption of Hybrid Cloud technology. It will also give IISc students exposure to industry-driven problem statements and mentorship from IBM researchers on research and open source. Not just for members of the two schools, but also for the region’s academic and industrial community, the lab will act as a focus for promoting ideas interchange.
“The IBM – IISc lab will bring together two leading research organizations in industry and academia to create an ecosystem for Hybrid Cloud research, in India, for India and the world. IISc has a strong record in research areas like Hybrid Cloud, AI, Security, which compliments the expertise of IBM Research, and we are excited to collaborate with IISc to create innovative, industry relevant solutions. Our Hybrid Cloud platform is Open, and we will jointly develop open-source software that provides interoperability, portability, and security that can be easily accessible to the vast community of developers to accelerate innovation” said Gargi Dasgupta, Director, IBM Research India.
Navakanta Bhat, Dean, Division of Interdisciplinary Sciences, IISc Bengaluru said, “IISc is very grateful to IBM for partnering with us on this ambitious initiative to establish this state-of-the-art lab on campus. We are particularly excited about making the joint research findings open source and accessible to a wide community which will significantly accelerate innovation in the emerging areas of AI and Hybrid Cloud. Such industry-academia partnerships are key to boosting the impact of research, and we are proud to work together with a technology leader like IBM.”
Prof. Yogesh Simmhan, Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, and Dr. Amith Singhee, Senior Manager and Senior Technical Staff Member of IBM Research, India, will co-chair the lab. The new lab expands on IBM Research and IISc’s 15-year knowledge exchange partnership, which includes guest lectures, cooperation through the open science initiative, internship possibilities, and more. The ACM Winter School on Hybrid Cloud, hosted by IISc and IBM Research in 2020, provided students (at the postgraduate level and above) with a comprehensive knowledge of the foundations of cloud computing. IBM Research also supports a secondary school STEM education programme at IISc.