Over on the Microsoft Azure Blog, Vani Mandava (Director, Data Science Research, Microsoft Research) highlights Microsoft’s partnership with NSF-funded big data initiatives including the Big Data Hubs. Microsoft has committed $6 million in cloud credits to support data science innovation across these programs, including the Northeast Big Data Hub’s Health Spoke project led by Chirag Patel (Harvard Medical School):
Chirag Patel, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School is working in epigenomics, specifically by building quantitative models that demonstrate what role certain microbial species play in disease of their human host. His team used Azure credits through NSF funded Northeast Big Data Hub to analyze metagenomes en masse through a catalog of 10 million unique genes, which was computationally infeasible with on-premise laboratory resources.
You can read more about this partnership at Microsoft Azure Blog, and learn more about the cloud credit initiative here.