National Science Foundation and Microsoft ink cloud computing partnership

The National Science Foundation and Microsoft announced a partnership on Thursday that will provide the agency funded researchers with free access to Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud computing services.

Jeannette Wing, assistant director for the NSF Computer and Information Science directorate, said the agency plans to provide $5 million in grants for research projects using Azure services, which would be available for three years.

NSF said the partnership will help broaden research capabilities, foster collaborative research communities and accelerate scientific discovery. Cloud computing, which involves accessing servers and storage via the Internet for computational and other purposes requiring more power, gives the "allusion of unlimited resources," Wing said in a Web news conference. She noted that cloud computing is "particularly suited for analyzing massive amounts of data."

Microsoft will make a research team available to help researchers use the cloud technology. In addition to projects aimed at "advancing our understanding of cloud computing," Wing said NSF is hoping computer scientists with expertise on how to leverage cloud computing will collaborate with other scientists on proposed projects.

"I think the science community (particularly physicists and biologists) ... are very interested in using this but may not know how," she said. "This is exactly the kind of challenge I'm posing to the broad scientific community."