Amazon, Microsoft offer free access to cloud resources for climate-change research

"Technology giants AWS, Microsoft and IBM have committed to award free access to their supercomputing and cloud resources to drive innovative climate-change research. The grant programmes are in support of the US government’s Climate Action Plan and Climate Data Initiative ... According to AWS, the climate change initiatives outlined by the Obama administration require large-scale analysis of climate data.   The cloud provider will award a total of 50 million core hours of supercomputing using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances with training and guidance from the AWS scientific computing team ... Its rival cloud provider Microsoft is also supporting the US president’s climate data initiative by planning to make available an initial collection of climate-research related datasets through its Azure Marketplace.  Microsoft Research will also grant 12 months of free cloud-computing resources to 20 awardees submitting proposals focused on food resilience and climate change by 15 September 2014.   It will provide the free IT resources through the Azure for Research program. Microsoft will co-host vents aimed at demonstrating the value of open-data and data-driven tools to boost climate preparedness and resilience in the agricultural sector.  Meanwhile, IBM will expand its World Community Grid program, which enables members of the public to donate their computer or mobile device's unused computing power to scientists. The expansion will provide scientists studying climate change topics with free access to dedicated virtual supercomputing resources and a platform to engage the public on their research.  Under the IBM programme, each researcher will have access to up to 100,000 years of computing time, a value of $60m in today's costs, said the White House Press Secretary."