Microsoft has been pushing its Windows Azure cloud-computing platform at every opportunity recently, and so it's no surprise that it took some time to talk up one of its latest projects at the Supercomputing 2010 conference.
The company has been working with the Seattle Children's Hospital to improve the way that the scientists research protein sequencing. These sorts of projects can be very complex and usually require a vast amount of computing power to complete in any sort of reasonable time. The problem is that this means investing a significant amount in purchasing and maintaining server hardware - Microsoft estimated that this project would have cost at least $3 million.
After porting the BLAST tool that the scientists were using to the Azure platform, they were able to run it on both local and cloud systems. This hybrid approach managed to complete the sequencing for a total cost of only around $18,000.
The company is now offering its findings to the scientific community, as well as releasing its port of the tool that was used.
In addition, the company announced that it had - with the help of the Tokyo Institute of Technology - broken the petaflop barrier on a system running Windows HPC Server. The impressive level of performance is reserved for only a small number of supercomputers around the world, and demonstrates that the platform is capable of providing the same sort of performance as Linux-based systems. It was also able to demonstrate performance of over a gigaflop-per-watt, which is significantly more efficient thant the average laptop.
Microsoft has been aggressively following through on its 'all-in' approach to cloud computing and recently announced that the first Azure-based data centre would be opening in the UK early next year, courtesy of long-time partner Fujitsu. It has also announced that the ability to run Windows Server 2008 R2 instances on Azure will be coming before the end of 2010, increasing the pressure on similar services, especially Amazon's EC2 platform.
