Microsoft has made a deal with the NSF to offer free cloud computing services to scientists, says The New York Times. “The goal of the three-year project is to give scientists the computing power to cope with exploding amounts of research data. It uses Microsoft’s Windows Azure computing system, …” “[Those systems] allow organizations and individuals to run computing tasks and Internet services remotely in relatively low-cost data centers.” “Microsoft’s commitment to scientific computing comes two years after a similar service was introduced by Google and I.B.M. … hoping to differentiate the new service by offering scientists a set of custom applications that simplified access to Azure and use of existing software applications like Microsoft Excel easily.” “… the explosion of data being collected by scientists had transformed the needs of the typical scientific research program on campus from a half-time graduate student one day a week to a full-time employee dedicated to managing the data. He said this kind of exponential growth in cost was increasingly hampering scientific research.”