14 DAY TRIAL // A new agreement between Microsoft and the National Science Foundation (NSF) is designed to provide researchers with the necessary resources to help them comb through immense volumes of data gathered and accelerate their projects. Essentially, Microsoft is delivering free access to Windows Azure for researchers that need scalable computational and data analysis computing. According to the Redmond company, the new agreement inked with NFS will permit certain research projects to benefit from a client-plus-cloud solution to their computational problems.
“Cloud computing can transform how research is conducted, accelerating scientific exploration, discovery and results,” explained Dan Reed, corporate vice president, Technology Strategy and Policy and eXtreme Computing at Microsoft.
Free access to advanced Windows Azure computing resources will be granted to both individual researchers and research groups which will be chosen through NSF’s merit review process. “These grants will also help researchers explore rich and diverse multidisciplinary data on a large scale,” Reed added.
Reed offered an example of what the new agreement brings to the table for researchers. The software giant’s VP of the eXtreme Computing group noted that by leveraging Windows Azure in concert with desktop resources, researchers would be able to run an Excel spreadsheet with billions of rows and columns and which took thousands of hours to compute, in just 10 minutes. “Client plus cloud computing offers that kind of sweet spot,” Reed stated.
Windows Azure became generally available on February 1st, 2010, although it graduated to production ready stage at the start of the year. Microsoft’s Cloud platform is capable of delivering with highly scalable, on-demand compute and storage resources. Researchers chosen by the NSF will be offered free access to Windows Azure for no less than three years. Microsoft underlined that all projects would also benefit from assistance from the company’s support team.
“We’ve entered a new era of science — one based on data-driven exploration — and each new generation of computing technology, such as cloud computing, creates unprecedented opportunities for discovery,” noted Jeannette M. Wing, assistant director for the NSF Computer and Information Science directorate. “We are working with Microsoft to provide the academic community a novel cloud computing service with which to experiment and explore, with the grander goal of advancing the frontiers of science and engineering as we tackle societal grand challenges.”