Microsoft, Amazon target climate change with cloud computing grants
July 29, 2014
Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.
Cloud computing providers Microsoft and AmazonWeb Services are opening up their pools of virtual servers to climate researchers via two new grant programs announced on Tuesday. Microsoft is offering a year’s worth of Azure cloud resources (180,000 computing hours and 20 terabytes of storage) to 20 recipients submitting proposals related to food resilience. According to a Microsoft Research blog post announcing the grants, “The overarching goal is to encourage data providers, scientists, farmers, food producers and the public to discover the food supply’s key vulnerabilities and inherent resiliency.” Proposals are due Sept. 15, 2014.
The food resilience grants will focus on a handful of USDA datasets, and are part of a broader mission Microsoft says it’s pursuing to address the issue. These efforts include “workshops, webinars, and ‘appathons’ to demonstrate the value of open access data and to promote the development of tools for understanding these datasets,” and the addition of additional datasets over the next year…
The food resilience effort itself is part of an ever broader climate change campaign by Microsoft that includes the hosting of — and free access to — a large collection of government datasets as part of President Obama’s Climate Data Initiative, and a more general-purpose research grant program…
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