Open Molecular Science Cloud (OMSC)

A short blog post about my trip to Italy in September 2019.

During the summer of 2019, having just finished my first year of my PhD program, I wanted to expand my horizons and my network. I applied and received a travel grant through the Molecular Software Science Institute (MolSSI) to attend the Open Molecular Science Cloud workshop held in Perugia and Rome, Italy. MolSSI is an institute based in Blacksburg, Virginia, that “serves as a nexus for science, education, and cooperation serving the worldwide community of computational molecular scientists – a broad field including of biomolecular simulation, quantum chemistry, and materials science” (https://molssi.org/about/). The participants from the United States included three other grant awardees, a representative from MolSSI, Daniel Smith (a fellow College of Charleston graduate I should mention!), and myself. The other grant awardees included (as listed in the picture below): Jessica Maat from University of California, Irvine, Stefan Seritan from Stanford University, and Vinicius Cruizerio from University of California, San Diego.

The first part of the workshop was hosted at the 12th European Conference on Computational Theoretical Chemistry (CTC EUCO 2019) in Perugia, Italy (September 2-5, 2019). At CTC EUCO 2019, I gave a talk proposing a resource to perform wavefunction based quantum chemical calculations using machine learning and cloud computing. The second half of the workshop was hosted at the Accademia Nazionale delle Scienze in Rome, Italy and focused on the development of the Open Molecular Science Cloud (OMSC) (September 5-6). During the Open Molecular Science Cloud (OMSC) workshop we worked on the development of a proposal for an open source cloud computing resource for computational chemists through the European Open Science Cloud framework. During the trip, I learned new things about open source software, cloud computing, and building collaborative projects. When I was not busy with the workshop, I visited the Vatican, explored Rome and Perugia, and enjoyed wonderful Italian cuisine—all while building my network! I’m very thankful for MolSSI for giving me the opportunity to attend this workshop and the CTC EUCO 2019 organizers for allowing me to give a talk at their conference. The stimulating talks and conversations with scientists from Europe and the United States helped me find a new passion for open source software and scientific computing.