Microsoft will offer up to 180,000 free cloud hours at its expense to any researcher selected for the program
Microsoft announced the launch of the Azure for Research program in Israel, under which the company will finance cloud services for high-performance scientific research. These days the company holds trainings for researchers at three research institutions with the aim of encouraging applications for the program at the Technion, Tel Aviv University and Ben Gurion University of the Negev.
The Microsoft Azure for Research program is a global program. To date, 360 studies have been approved in the program at leading research institutions around the world. The studies are spread across diverse scientific fields, including: biotechnology, physics, chemistry, civil engineering, climate, urban sciences, ecology and more.
With the launch of the program in Israel, Microsoft invited hundreds of scientists to submit their applications and enjoy the large computing resources necessary for this type of research, for example up to 180,000 cloud hours and 20 terabytes of storage for each research that meets the criteria of the program and is approved.
Microsoft's Azure cloud platform will provide researchers with high processing and analysis capabilities of huge amounts of data accumulated in research, using powerful processing technologies. As an open environment, it will allow any researcher to use a wide variety of development languages including: Java, PHP, Node.js, Python as well as Microsoft .NET. Azure also supports diverse environments such as: Linux, Hadoop and more.
Yoram Yacovi, CEO of Microsoft's R&D center in Israel: "Cloud services may upgrade the research capabilities of the Israeli academy, speed up research, improve quality and reduce the cost of any research. High processing capabilities needed for analyzing huge amounts of information (big data) or 'high performance computing' (HPC) are currently very expensive, require infrastructure investment and are not available at any given moment. The cloud services offer a powerful alternative, cheap, flexible and available for every need. I see the launch of the program in Israel as an important step in the cooperation between academia and industry, which is valuable for both parties."
Professor David Horn, Tel Aviv University, Chairman of the Advisory Committee for Central Research Infrastructures for the Academy: "The road map for central research infrastructures published by Parsama Co., Ltd. in early 2014 included the establishment of a cloud computing service unit. Microsoft's contribution enables academic activity in the same direction proposed by the road map. Our goal is to encourage the use of cloud infrastructure for high-performance computing and we welcome any additional resources that will help achieve this goal. Using cloud infrastructures may expand the range of possibilities for researchers in Israel, and make available to them computing capabilities that are beyond the potential of the intra-university computing centers."
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Father, you will be surprised, but the project World Community Grid has a performance of about 413.240 TFLOPS. If you are in the business, you should understand that this is a power that does not put a supercomputer to shame.
In calculations that require high-performance computers (what were once called supercomputers), the power of home computers, however many there may be, will not be enough.
It's a shame that no one talks about projects like this http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ in which the public volunteers its computing power for research.