A New York Times article describes a new initiative by Microsoft and the National Science Foundation to assist scientists in utilizing cloud services to manage and analyze the tsunami of data that characterizes modern sensor-based science.
UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska is quoted in the article: “Simplicity of use is one Microsoft goal. So far, programming modern cloud systems for full efficiency has been difficult. The company is trying to overcome this difficulty in creating a variety of software tools for scientists, said Ed Lazowska, a University of Washington computer scientist who works closely with the Microsoft researchers. Dr. Lazowska said the explosion of data being collected by scientists had transformed the needs of the typical scientific research program …”
New York Times article here. NSF announcement here. Blog post by Microsoft’s Dan Reed here. UW eScience Institute here.