US government scientists get Azure for free

The deal, which lasts for three years, is a smart move by Microsoft for it will encourage at least some of the scientists to stick with Azure once the time period is completed. To help create that stickiness for the service, Microsoft is also giving those receiving grants with access to a set of tools, applications and data collections that will be shared across the academic community covered by NSF. The company will also provide expertise and support in research, science and cloud computing areas.

 

To get a grant, the scientists will need to present research projects where the use of Cloud Computing will play an important role.

 

The deal should therefore give Azure some heavyweight use that will no doubt be valuable in evaluating the service as it now moves towards `prime time’ as a platform. As Jeannette Wing, NSF assistant director for computer and information science and engineering, observed, the Cloud as a research platform is still under-explored territory, but it is expected to be particularly useful for analysing massive amounts of data. It will also be a good test vehicle for evaluating Cloud Computing as a platform for both compute-intensive and data-intensive services.

 

As yet there is no word from Microsoft that it plans to extend the deal to any other countries or any other applications areas such as business or engineering.