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Microsoft’s cloud has Ebola

by on21 October 2014



Saving the world one network at a time

Software giant Microsoft has offered the huge computing power of its cloud network to researchers trying to find a cure for Ebola. Microsoft will provide free cloud-computing and research applications to researchers working on the Ebola virus.

The move will give qualified medical researchers access to Microsoft's cloud-computing platform Azure – essentially a group of datacentres that allow users to access large amounts of information and computing power remotely over the Internet. Using Microsoft's vast web of datacentres could be helpful to researchers looking to store and analyse large sets of data that would be difficult to study using only local computers and networks.

"One of the things tomorrow morning we're going to do is make available Azure computer power to the research community," Nadella said at a presentation in San Francisco last night.

Microsoft has some tools which its researchers built to carry out vaccine discovery, so we want to take all of that and make it available for the research community. According to the company's website, Microsoft's research unit is "soliciting cloud computing proposals for projects that are working towards developing a better understanding of the spread and cure of the Ebola virus."

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