Enji Takeda, Solutions Architect and Technical Manager, Microsoft Research Connections EMEA, writes:
Cloud computing can seem daunting, but Windows Azure makes it easier than ever to analyze and manage large datasets in the cloud. Want to know more? Then please join us (December 4 or December 5, depending on your time zone) for the next installment in our webinar series that explains what, why, and how of the cloud can free you from limited computing resources and the expense of hardware procurement.
One of the best ways to get going is to use one of the pre-configured “science-in-a-box” Linux virtual machines. These great little packages bring together all of the tools you need, so that you can deploy them in the cloud with just a few mouse clicks. You can grab these from our VM Depot, where there are dozens to choose from, including BioLinux and a Data Science VM with IPython, as well as big data tools such as Kafka and STORM. In tomorrow’s webinar, we’ll walk you through how to create Linux and Windows VMs for scientific applications, both from VM Depot and from scratch, so you can build your own VM tuned for your research. Once you’ve built your VM, you can literally spin up hundreds of them to run those big calculations needed to meet your publication deadline—that’s the power of the cloud in action.
We’re delighted to present the webinar twice, at 8:00 A.M. Pacific Time (that’s 4:00 P.M. GMT December 4, morning for Western Hemisphere researchers and late afternoon for those in Europe and Africa), and at 6:00 P.M. Pacific Time (2:00 A.M. GMT December 5, and after breakfast in Asia). Wherever you are on the globe, we hope you join us online for this informative session.
To complement the webinars, we’ve created some getting started guides at the Windows Azure for Research site to provide a deeper dive. So please join us for the webinar series and dig deeper with our technical papers to liberate your research by reaching for the cloud.
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