Microsoft used its 12th annual Research Faculty Summit last week to announce the launch of its new platform, code-named ‘Daytona’, in response to calls from researchers for a new data analysis and processing framework.

The platform combines Windows Azure – Microsoft’s existing platform-as-a-service and an integral part of its Cloud strategy –with its MapReduce framework and has been designed to help the company’s scientists access and manipulate large data sets.

The team driving the project aim to expand the use of Azure into the realm of "big data" scientific computing, providing a “simple tool” for researchers across a wide range of industries to use with their ever growing data collections.

The toolset works by running a wide class of analytics on Windows Azure allowing scientists to analyze their largest data collections, thus bringing the cloud to scientists' fingertips. Running in the Cloud enables researchers to deploy the MapReduce runtime to all Windows Azure virtual machines in a network.
And, specifically designed for cloud storage services, Project Daytona can consume data with minimum overheads and with the ability to recover from failures. Other features, claim Microsoft, include its horizontal scalability and elasticity and its ability to deliver high performance data analytics.

In a briefing statement, Dan Reed, corporate vice president of the technology policy group at Microsoft highlighted how Daytona gives scientists more flexibility and freedom with their use of the Cloud. Essentially, Microsoft scientists no longer need to be tied to one computer or need detailed knowledge of cloud programming.

Said reed: “We’re very excited to empower the research community with this enhanced tool kit that will hopefully lead to greater scientific insights as a result of large-scale data analytics capabilities.”