Project Catapult Academic Program

At this year’s Supercomputing 2015 Conference in Austin, Texas, Microsoft is announcing the availability of Project Catapult clusters to academic researchers through the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin. Project Catapult, a Microsoft research venture, offers a groundbreaking way to vastly improve the performance and energy efficiency of datacenter workloads.

November 2015 | Microsoft Research Blog

Operating a datacenter at web scale requires managing many conflicting requirements. The ability to deliver computation at a high level and speed is a given, but because of the demands such a facility must meet, a datacenter also needs flexibility. Additionally, it must be efficient in its use of power, keeping costs as low as possible. Addressing often conflicting goals is a challenge, leading datacenter providers to seek constant performance…

June 2014 | Microsoft Research Blog

The high-level architecture of datacenter servers has been generally stable for many years, based on some combination of CPUs, DRAM, Ethernet, and disks (with solid-state drives a more recent addition). While the capacities and speeds of the components—and the datacenter scale—have grown, the basic server architecture has evolved slowly.

February 2015 | Microsoft Research Blog