Microsoft partners with National Science Foundation to empower data science breakthroughs

Over the past decade, Microsoft has partnered with the National Science Foundation (NSF) on three separate programs, first in 2010, and more recently through a commitment of $6M in cloud credits across two NSF supported data science programs – with the Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs and as part of the NSF BigData solicitation.

The engagement with NSF has helped Microsoft reach diverse research groups such as the Big Data Hubs that brings together communities of data scientists to spark and nurture collaborations between domain experts, researchers, communities, state partners, nonprofits, and industry.

As of today, Microsoft has provided 17 cloud credit awards to Principal Investigators (PIs) who benefit from NSF supported programs. These collaborations are already seeing some interesting breakthroughs across the human body, microbial diseases, and even everyday communication –

Academic research computing is going through a fundamental transformation evident with an increasing number of researchers and domain scientists shifting their data intensive research workloads to the cloud. With an average of more than four out of five higher education institutions already using at least one service in the cloud, the widespread adoption of cloud based research computing is inevitable.

Over the past decade, Microsoft Azure has accelerated its pace of innovation to become an obvious scalable and on-demand infrastructure choice for computation dependent technology workloads.

Central IT at universities recognize the benefits and face enormous opportunities and demands to keep up with the transformation to cloud. Fortunately, pioneering funding agencies like the NSF are acknowledging the major role that public cloud providers can play in ensuring that academia is supported in their journey towards the cloud.

Microsoft is committed to a continued partnership with the National Science Foundation in its efforts to bring the power of the cloud to research computing in academia. We will continue to update the Microsoft Azure roadmap to help the community stay informed as new releases become available.

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