Helping research communities build scientific tools and data analysis services in the Windows Azure cloud
The Cloud Research Engagement project facilitates and accelerates scholarly and scientific research by enabling researchers to use the power of Windows Azure to perform big data computations in the cloud. We build the components of cloud technology and work with researchers in the field on projects that push the frontier of client and cloud computing.
News
Eco-Testing a Building Before It Is Even Built | |
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New civil engineering tools that take advantage of the power of cloud computing on Windows Azure have the potential to reduce the time and cost of energy-efficient building by allowing in-depth simulations of a building’s performance during the design phase. Read more…
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Cloud Computing Unlocks Drug Discovery | |
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Toxicity prediction presents a great challenge to scientists developing new drugs; the massive data analysis requirements require a costly computer infrastructure. But with Windows Azure, scientists can analyze big data affordably and quickly—in the cloud. Read more…
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Fighting Wildfires with Data | |
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The University of the Aegean in Greece developed a new application—featuring Bing Maps, Microsoft Silverlight, and Windows Azure—to determine the daily wildfire risk in Lesvos during its dry season. With the help of a daily visualization of the environmental factors, the island’s fire management team uses the app to determine resource allocation for the day. Read more… For More Information
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Supercomputing on Demand with Windows Azure | |
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Learn how Windows Azure can simplify the management of large-scale computations and how, together with FaST-LMM—an algorithm developed by Microsoft Research—it drastically reduced processing times to find new associations between genomes and diseases. Read more... For More Information
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Announcements
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The Cloud for Science Project Begins with Genomics The Cloud for Science project, launched in July of 2012, will explore prototypes for community supported data collections and services. The initial projects will be genomics and social sciences. Microsoft Research Connections and the Microsoft European Advanced Technology Lab have begun a collaboration with the research teams of Professor Paul Watson at the University of Newcastle and Professor Ignacio Blanquer from the University Politécnica Valencia to build genomic data collections and top community research analysis tools hosted on Windows Azure. The project results will be available as services in the Windows Azure Marketplace. |
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IPython Notebook on Windows Azure As part of an effort to support the scientific community, the Windows Azure team now supports the interactive IPython Notebook on Windows Azure. |
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Project Daytona: Iterative MapReduce on Windows Azure Microsoft has developed an iterative MapReduce runtime for Windows Azure, code-named "Daytona." Project Daytona is designed to support a wide class of data analytics and machine learning algorithms. It can scale out to hundreds of server cores for analysis of distributed data. Project Daytona was developed as part of the eXtreme Computing Group’s Cloud Research Engagement Initiative.
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NCBI BLAST on Windows Azure |
About the Cloud Research Engagement Project
Basic research in most academic disciplines is undergoing a fundamental shift from the three traditional paradigms of theory, experiment, and computation to a new fourth paradigm of data-driven discovery. Few researchers have access and the required knowledge to use and operate the high-end computer and data resources they need to handle massive data analysis challenges; as a result, the majority of scholars must scale back their work to the capabilities of their desktop.
The Microsoft Cloud Research Engagement Project began in 2010 with a vision for how science was changing and the role that cloud computing would play. The project began with two basic questions.
- What scientific applications work well in the Windows Azure cloud?
- Can the science funding agencies view cloud computing as an alternative to purchasing and maintaining research computing clusters?
We approached these questions by building partnerships with interested research funding agencies, as follows.
- United States: We partnered with the National Science Foundation for the “Computing in the Cloud” program that supported 28 research teams.
- Europe: We partnered with a European Commission Framework 7 project called VENUS-C, which began with seven core partners and then, through an open call to the research community, an additional 13 projects were added.
- United Kingdom: A project was started with University of Nottingham EPSRC Horizon project.
- France: A project was started with INRIA.
- Japan: We partnered with the National Informatics Institute and we funded seven projects there.
- Australia: We worked with the Australian National University, National ICT Australia (NICTA), and Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO). This resulted in another seven projects.
We have made additional agreements with the Taiwan National Science Council and the Chinese Academy of Science where we are still adding new projects. Applications are welcome. As the program grew we added an additional set of non-funded projects that brought the total to around 80.
The Microsoft Research Cloud Research Engagement team supports researchers in the field who use Windows Azure to facilitate the storage and analysis of today’s ever-growing data stores. Our activities include:
- Hosting reference data sets in Windows Azure, selected based on research value and interest
- Providing common services and tools in Windows Azure as coherent solution accelerators for researchers to use to carry out their research projects
- Jaliya Ekanayake, Jared Jackson, Wei Lu, Roger Barga, and Atilla Soner Balkir, A Scalable Communication Runtime for Clouds, in Proceedings IEEE Cloud 2011, The 4th International Conference on Cloud Computing, IEEE Computer Society, 4 July 2011
- Ankur Dave, Roger Barga, Wei Lu, and Jared Jackson, CloudClustering: Toward an iterative data processing pattern on the cloud, in Proceedings of IEEE DataCloud 2011, IEEE, 16 June 2011
- Roger Barga, Bill Howe, David Beck, Stuart Bowers, William Dobyns, Winston Haynes, Roger Higdon, Chris Howard, Christian Roth, Elizabeth Stewart, Dean Welch, and Eugene Kolker, Bioinformatics and Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery in the Beginning of the 21st Century, in OMICS A Journal of Integrative Biology, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., 2011
- Keith Crochow, Bill Howe, Mark Stoermer, Roger Barga, and Ed Lazowska, Client + Cloud: Evaluating Seamless Architectures for Visual Data Analytics in the Ocean Sciences, in Proceedings of 22nd international conference on scientific and statistical database management., Springer Verlag, 28 June 2010
- Eran Chinthaka Withana, Beth Plale, Roger Barga, and Nelson Araujo, Versioning for Workflow Evolution, in Proceedings of The Third International Workshop on Data Intensive Distributed Computing, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 21 June 2010
- Wei Lu, Jared Jackson, and Roger Barga, AzureBlast: A Case Study of Developing Science Applications on the Cloud, in Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Scientific Cloud Computing (Science Cloud 2010), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 21 June 2010
- John R. Delaney and Roger S. Barga, Observing the Oceans - A 2020 Vision for Ocean Science, in The Fourth Paradigm: Data Intensive Scientific Discovery, Microsoft Research, 22 November 2009
