Last week, we hosted the 2026 i-Scale Kickoff Meeting, marking the start of a collaborative systems research partnership between academia and industry, enabled by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The event brought together researchers from Boston University and Northeastern University, along with industry representatives from i-Scale partner organizations Cisco, Everpure, G-Research, Lenovo, Red Hat, and SHI International Corp.

i-Scale, the Center for Systems Innovation at Scale, is an NSF-funded Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC), whose mission is to explore the unique challenges of computing systems at large scale, across software, networking, and hardware layers.

“We value the opportunity to collaborate with our industry and academic colleagues and develop the future of our research partnership. We look forward to seeing the innovative systems research projects that will be cultivated through i-Scale.”
—Jon Stumpf, Principal Architect—AI and Data Center, SHI International Corp.