National Science Foundation Announces Collaborative Cloud Computing Awardee

By DE Editors

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced the awardees who will be funded through the collaborative cloud computing agreement that Microsoft Corp. and NSF announced in February 2010. The agreement will offer the award recipients "individual researchers and research groups "free access to cloud computing resources that can enable faster, less expensive processing across geographically distributed data centers. By extending the capabilities PC applications via Microsoft cloud services, the program intends to help broaden research capabilities, foster collaborative research communities, and accelerate scientific discovery.

Microsoft will provide the 13 cloud computing research projects identified by NSF through its peer review process with access to Windows Azure "a cloud computing platform that provides on-demand computing and storage to host, scale and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers "for a two-year period, along with a support team to help researchers quickly integrate cloud technology into their research. Microsoft researchers and developers will work with grant recipients to equip them with a set of common tools, applications and data collections that can be shared with the broad academic community.

The goal of the new program is to make simple yet powerful tools readily available to researchers to use to extract insights by mining and combining diverse data sets.

For more information, visit the National Science Foundation.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.