A year of research in the cloud

Published

A year ago, the Microsoft Azure for Research project (opens in new tab) began as a small effort to help external researchers and scientists (and even Microsoft) understand how the cloud generally—and Microsoft Azure specifically—could accelerate research insights. Microsoft Azure for Research facilitates scholarly and scientific research by enabling researchers to take full advantage of the power and scalability of cloud computing for collaboration, computation, and data-intensive processing. Training events, online training, webcasts, and technical papers are just some of the resources the project provides to help researchers get up to speed with cloud computing.

Microsoft Azure for Research celebrates a successful first year

The project also features an award program (opens in new tab), which provides qualified research proposals with substantial grants of Microsoft Azure storage and compute resources for one year. The response to the award program has been overwhelming. In the past year, we have received more than 700 proposals, with submissions from all seven continents—yes, there was even one proposal from researchers in Antarctica!

Spotlight: AI-POWERED EXPERIENCE

Microsoft research copilot experience

Discover more about research at Microsoft through our AI-powered experience

Start now

I’m pleased to report that Microsoft Azure for Research has granted awards (opens in new tab) to more than half of the submitted project proposals, facilitating research in a wide range of disciplines, including computer science, biology, environmental science, genomics, and planetary science. The project clearly has tapped into the pent-up demand of researchers who want to focus their time and resources on solving complex problems rather than managing computing systems.

And while we’re still in the early days of this transition of research to the cloud, the first results are encouraging. To cite just a couple of cloud-enabled outcomes, we’ve seen urbanologists analyze big data to create new traffic-prediction models, and we’ve watched researchers from an array of disciplines work to unravel the effects of climate change on surface flooding via the National Flood Interoperability Experiment. The results of these projects and the other 360 that have received Microsoft Azure for Research grants demonstrate that Azure is a powerful resource for scholarly and scientific researchers.

If you have an idea for a cloud-enabled research project, we encourage you to apply for a Microsoft Azure for Research grant. The award program has a standing request for proposal (RFP) for any project that uses Microsoft Azure in research; these proposals are reviewed on the fifteenth of even-numbered months (February, April, June, August, October, and December). The program also issues special-opportunity RFPs, most of which have a set deadline for submission. Current special-opportunity RFPs and their deadlines include Azure Machine Learning (November 15, 2014), Climate Data (November 15, 2014), Food Resilience Climate Data (November 15, 2014), Celebration of Women in Computing (December 15, 2014), and Ebola Research (deadline is open-ended). Learn more about these RFPs (opens in new tab).

—Dan Fay (opens in new tab), Director, Microsoft Research

Learn more