Each grant will provide researchers associated with these organisations with three years of free access to Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud computing platform, as well as access to technical support and client tools being developed by Microsoft. The supported projects will explore a range of topics, including the analysis of online social networks, a cloud-based geophysical imaging platform, computational chemistry and other science applications.

A recent study by the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering - "Cloud Computing: Opportunities and Challenges for Australia" - recently recommended that scientific research could benefit from using online services. Professor Craig Mudge, one of the report's authors, said that 'It will also make a contribution to innovation as enterprising researchers launch new forms of business, namely, those competing on ideas rather than sizes of capital budgets'.

The first partnership is with NICTA, Australia's Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Research Centre of Excellence. Dr. Anna Liu, Cloud Computing Research Project Leader at NICTA, said that 'NICTA will use the Windows Azure platform to study patterns in social network usage and to explore reasoning of structured data on the Web. This is a unique opportunity for us to conduct these studies at an unprecedented scale, so that we can address difficult real-world problems, such as those associated with the collection, management and sharing of information in large e-health systems.'

The second grant will go to the ANU and the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) to provide Australian researchers with world-class high-end computing services. Professor Lindsay Botten, director of NCI, said that 'These new resources will open up exciting opportunities for solving data-intensive research problems in novel ways, increase the diversity of tools available to researchers and allow NCI to explore ways of migrating advanced computational services into the cloud.'

The third partner, CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, will receive resources to support a project focusing on transport and logistics. Dr. Ian Oppermann, director, CSIRO ICT Centre, said, 'Having this staggering computing power available to us in one spot is a wonderful opportunity for our scientists. I can't wait to see what our imaging, modeling and simulation researchers will do with this much raw power at their fingertips.'

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced similar partnerships with the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the U.S., the National Institute of Informatics (NII) in Japan, and in Europe with the European Commission's VENUS-C project, INRIA in France and the University of Nottingham in the U.K.