Microsoft offers free cloud platform to academics

Nottingham University gets three years of free Azure usage

Microsoft is partnering with educational institutions across Europe

Microsoft is providing scientific researchers across Europe with free access and support around its Azure cloud platform.

The initiative forms part of the company’s global cloud research engagement initiative launched earlier this year.

Dan Reed, corporate vice president, eXtreme Computing Group and Technology Strategy and Policy at Microsoft, detailed three cloud programmes aimed at the European research community while speaking at the Open Grid Forum.

Microsoft has initiated three partnerships in Europe: with Europe’s VENUS-C (Virtual Multidisciplinary EnviroNments USing Cloud Infrastructures) consortium, with France’s INRIA (National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control), and with the UK’s University of Nottingham’s Horizon Institute, a digital economy research institute.

Both INRIA and Horizon will be provided with three years of free access to Windows Azure, which delivers on-demand compute and storage to host, scale and manage web applications on the internet through Microsoft datacentres.

Derek McAuley, professor of computer science at the University of Nottingham and director of Horizon, said: “There are a large number of projects that can make use of these facilities, including mobile applications with a server side component – we’re starting to use Azure for some of those servers.”