The Open Cloud Institute (OCI) created in 2015 is part of an initiative to develop degree programs in cloud computing and big data and foster collaboration with industry, positioning UTSA and San Antonio as world leaders in open cloud technology. With UTSA already recognized as the top university in the country for cybersecurity, the Open Cloud Institute further distinguishes UTSA as a top tier-research institution. OCI has already received many in-kind donations from industry leaders such as Rackspace, Yahoo, AMD, Intel, Mellanox Technologies and Seagate, and the OpenStack Foundation. OCI is a neutral, third party research and education laboratory that encourages research, the development, and adoption of standards-based open technologies such as open compute, openstack, and openflow by providing infrastructure, platform and software.
The OCI has one of the largest Open Clouds in academia utilizing OpenStack software, co-founded by Rackspace and Open Compute hardware, founded by Facebook, to support advanced computing and big-data analytics research.
The primary goals of the Institute include:
- Building infrastructure research in collaboration with industry partners and Open communities
- Enabling engineering and scientific research on Open Cloud with bursting to public clouds
- Training a pipeline of students to be prepared for the future demands of the workforce.
Mission
- Support the development and implementation of degree programs in cloud computing and big data.
- Support faculty research activities and projects on cloud computing and data analytics and help make UTSA the top choice in Texas for education and research in cloud computing.
- Set up state-of-the art cloud computing facility for faculty research and educational activities.
- Develop collaborations with industry and other academic institutions to bring the latest technologies and extramural funding in cloud computing to the University.
Vision
To become a leading research institute supporting education and research in cloud computing with local and global impact.
