Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future

Today, Microsoft and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the latest awardees for the joint Microsoft-NSF research partnership in cloud computing. (See the NSF announcement: The Sky Is No Limit: 13 Research Teams Compute in the Clouds.) This is a continuation of the program that then NSF Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), Jeannette Wing, and I announced in February 2010 (See Microsoft and the National Science Foundation Enable Research in the Cloud and Democratizing Research: How “Client Plus Cloud” Computing Can Amplify What’s Possible for Scientists).

As part of this agreement with the NSF, Microsoft is making available access to Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. In addition, a support team of Microsoft researchers and developers is working with grant recipients to equip them with a set of common tools, applications and data collections that can be shared with the broad academic community, and also providing expertise in research, science and cloud computing. Broader details on the program and its research tools and software for Windows Azure can be found here.

Diverse Projects

All of the award recipients were selected via NSF’s rigorous peer review process, which emphasized the scientific merit of the proposed work. Projects range from exploring scientific applications of cloud computing as well as extensions of cloud computing with new tools and techniques.

• Cornell University (Kenneth Birman) – Building Scalable Trust in Cloud Computing
• J. Craig Venter Institute (Audrey Tovchigrechko) – Bettering Interactive Protein-Protein Docking
• SUNY at Buffalo (Tevfik Kosar) – Enhancing Stork Data Scheduler for Azure
• University of California, San Diego (Kenneth Yocum) – Utilizing Continuous Bulk Processing
• University of Colorado, Boulder (Richard Han) – Enabling Mobile Cloud Computing
• University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Qiaozhu Mei) – Refining Language Models using Web-scale Language Networks
• University of North Carolina at Charlotte (Zhengchang Su) – Predicting Transcription Factor Binding Sites for Genes
• University of South Carolina (Jonathan Goodall) and the University of Virginia (Marty A. Humphrey) – Managing Large Watershed Systems
• University of Southern California (Viktor Prasanna) – Tackling Large Scale Graph Problems
• University of Texas at Austin (Michael Walfish) – Storing Data with Minimal Trust
• University of Washington (Magdalena Balazinska) – Understanding Relational Data Markets
• Virginia Tech (Wuchun Feng) – Conducting Intensive Biocomputing
• Virginia Tech (Kwa-Sur Tam) – Effectively and Widely Using Renewable Energy Sources

Worldwide Reach

The Microsoft/NSF partnership is but one part of a broader international program that the eXtreme Computing Group (XCG) and Microsoft Research are building with the scientific research agencies worldwide. We believe cloud computing, coupled with powerful client tools, can transform the nature of research. This worldwide program currently targets collaborations with several national and international research partnerships, including

• National Institute of Informatics of Japan Info-plosion project
• European Commission FP7 funding program, Venus-C project
• U.K. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Horizon project
• French INRIA-Microsoft collaboration on cloud computing
• Australian engagements with NICTA, ANU and CSIRO

Power via Simplicity

This Microsoft/government partnership is about so much more than access to cloud computing resources. The deep partnership between academic and Microsoft researchers, creation and release of easy-to-use client tools and an exploration of the new world of massive data are all key elements of our shared journey to a new model of data rich analysis enabled by powerful client tools and cloud services.

Any successful technology ultimately becomes invisible, enabling and empowering without requiring the user to focus on the idiosyncrasies of the technology itself. Technical computing can and should be an invisible intellectual amplifier, as easy to use as any other successful consumer technology. As I wrote last year when we first launched this program, it is really about transforming how we conduct research by broadening researcher capabilities, fostering collaborative research communities, and accelerating scientific discovery by shifting the focus from infrastructure to empowerment.