Microsoft encourages scientists to put their data (if not their heads) in the cloud

Stephen Withers
Friday, 05 February 2010 11:08

IT Industry - Development

Microsoft is providing selected scientific researchers with free access to its Azure cloud platform.

A few years ago, companies such as IBM were pushing the 'grid' wagon for scientific computing. That terminology seemed to fade after Oracle started applying that label to its application clustering scheme.

These days, the talk is of cloud computing. And Microsoft is helping the scientific community deal with large data sets by providing free access to Azure for selected projects.

Those projects will be selected by the US National Science Foundation's (NSF) merit review process.

Microsoft will provide those projects with access to Windows Azure for three years, plus the support needed to exploit cloud technology in the research.

Azure is a scalable environment that provides computational, storage, hosting and management capabilities; an SQL database in the cloud; and mechanisms to connect cloud and on-premises applications.

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