Microsoft Releases Large-Scale Data Processing Cloud Tool

July 19, 2011

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Yesterday, at the opening day of the 12th annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, Microsoft released a new platform designed to aid researchers deal with big data on the cloud. Codenamed "Daytona," this is the first viable technology to come out of Microsoft Research’s eXtreme Computing Group (XCG) — a development group aimed at parallel programming models, cloud software, data center architectures, and specialty hardware accelerators.

The new platform aims to provide researchers with terabytes of data to analyze a super-user friendly interface to access Microsoft’s cloud. Daytona can scale out to hundreds of server cores for distributed data analysis.

Roger Barga, an architect in Microsoft Research’s XCG, says that Daytona will have an easy-to-use programming interface for developers to write machine-learning and data-analytics algorithms. “They don’t have to know too much about distributed computing or how they’re going to spread the computation out, and they don’t need to know the specifics of Windows Azure,” says Barga.

New releases of Daytona are scheduled monthly, which will incorporate updates based on feedback from the scientific and research communities, and is also being distributed for free.

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