The effects of climate change are moving from the realm of simulation to stark reality. Understanding, managing and mitigating these effects is a critical endeavour for the global research community.
To support this effort, Microsoft Research is offering 40 Azure Awards, each with 180,000 core hours of cloud compute and 20 terabytes of cloud storage to help climate researchers. The deadline for the Climate Data Initiative call for proposals is 15th June 2014, and Microsoft Research is soliciting researchers to simply submit a short (3-page) proposal online with the first word of your proposal being ‘CDI’. As part of this, Microsoft is also offering their FetchClimate environmental information cloud platform for researchers to deploy, and customise, for making their own data as easy to access as finding a hotel or coffee shop on a map.
The next deadline for Microsoft Research’s regular bi-monthly call for proposals is also 15th June, and proposals can be from any domain. Microsoft Research is already supporting over 200 projects worldwide which are now exploring how Microsoft Azure can help in environmental science, machine learning, social sciences, life sciences, humanities, computer vision, urban computing, big data, streaming data and internet of things projects. They awarded 47 new projects in the April round of proposals and is looking forward to receiving new proposals. Please read the FAQ for extra tips and information on how to apply online..
You can keep in touch about the Azure for Research programme on LinkedIn & Twitter (@azure4research), to see if cloud computing can help you with your research