Microsoft Azure for Research Grant
One of the most interesting divisions at Microsoft is Microsoft Research. In this division, research and development is conducted on a variety of topics and, among other things, there is a project such as Microsoft Azure for Research. This project helps researchers use cloud computing in their work by donating the computing power of Microsoft Azure. Our Center for the Study of Internet and Society received this grant, and in this post I will tell you how it was and what came of it.
VKontakte social network today is 5-10 times more Russian-speaking Facebook and is of great interest to researchers. The user graph contains about 220 million nodes, and the number of posts is in the billions. At the same time, VKontakte is often ignored by researchers from social sciences, despite a more open privacy policy than, for example, Facebook. This can partly be explained by the difficulty of collecting large amounts of data, including users and their friends, posts and comments to them, data on likes and reposts. In addition, there are no ready-made analysis tools, such as, for example, NodeXL for Facebook. It can be assumed that sociologists do not always possess the necessary skills of programming and database management. The goal of our project is to solve this problem and release an anonymized dataset in the public domain containing links between users, groups, posts and likes. Thanks to Microsoft Azure, we will try to simplify the task of social scientists and give them additional opportunities for analysis.
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The process of obtaining a grant begins with the writing of an application, the detailed requirements for which are described on the project website - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/azure/ . In short, the application should be no more than three pages in free form, it should describe the problem the researchers are working on, and why it is important. In addition, it is necessary to describe the required resources. At the same time, do not be shy and request less than necessary - the size of the grant is large, and, as written on the website in the FAQ section, a request for 200 TB of storage and 200,000 hours is acceptable. In our application, we wrote that we need 4 TB of SQL Premium, 8 TB of storage, 32 copies of the cloud service and 30 TB of traffic.
After the application is written, you must fill out a simple form on the website ( http://www.windowsazurepass.com/research ) and hope that your application will be approved. Applications are reviewed on the 15th of each even month - therefore, the process of receiving a grant may be somewhat delayed, but alerts will be sent to the email about the application being completed by instance, so that you will always be aware of the current situation.
Despite the fact that the scope of projects is not limited, sometimes special programs are conducted. So, on April 15 there was a deadline for the project “Virtual Machines for Research”, and at the current moment there is a project “Climatic data” with a deadline of June 15.
We sent our application on January 24, on February 2, a message arrived in the mail that our application was under consideration and this could take up to 60 days, and on March 7 we approved our application. Thus, the whole process (not counting the time of writing the application) took 42 days.
As a result, we received:
The duration of the grant is 1 year, which is quite suitable for our task. It is not clear why we were given only 100 GB of SQL Database. Currently, the maximum possible size of a SQL Database is 150 GB, and SQL Database Premium is 500 GB. Could give more :)
So, if you are working in a research organization, you may well get this grant. As our experience has shown, this is quite realistic; you just need to get together and write an application.
A little bit about our project, under which we received a grant
VKontakte social network today is 5-10 times more Russian-speaking Facebook and is of great interest to researchers. The user graph contains about 220 million nodes, and the number of posts is in the billions. At the same time, VKontakte is often ignored by researchers from social sciences, despite a more open privacy policy than, for example, Facebook. This can partly be explained by the difficulty of collecting large amounts of data, including users and their friends, posts and comments to them, data on likes and reposts. In addition, there are no ready-made analysis tools, such as, for example, NodeXL for Facebook. It can be assumed that sociologists do not always possess the necessary skills of programming and database management. The goal of our project is to solve this problem and release an anonymized dataset in the public domain containing links between users, groups, posts and likes. Thanks to Microsoft Azure, we will try to simplify the task of social scientists and give them additional opportunities for analysis.
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Grant Application
The process of obtaining a grant begins with the writing of an application, the detailed requirements for which are described on the project website - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/azure/ . In short, the application should be no more than three pages in free form, it should describe the problem the researchers are working on, and why it is important. In addition, it is necessary to describe the required resources. At the same time, do not be shy and request less than necessary - the size of the grant is large, and, as written on the website in the FAQ section, a request for 200 TB of storage and 200,000 hours is acceptable. In our application, we wrote that we need 4 TB of SQL Premium, 8 TB of storage, 32 copies of the cloud service and 30 TB of traffic.
After the application is written, you must fill out a simple form on the website ( http://www.windowsazurepass.com/research ) and hope that your application will be approved. Applications are reviewed on the 15th of each even month - therefore, the process of receiving a grant may be somewhat delayed, but alerts will be sent to the email about the application being completed by instance, so that you will always be aware of the current situation.
Despite the fact that the scope of projects is not limited, sometimes special programs are conducted. So, on April 15 there was a deadline for the project “Virtual Machines for Research”, and at the current moment there is a project “Climatic data” with a deadline of June 15.
results
We sent our application on January 24, on February 2, a message arrived in the mail that our application was under consideration and this could take up to 60 days, and on March 7 we approved our application. Thus, the whole process (not counting the time of writing the application) took 42 days.
As a result, we received:
- 32 cloud service instances for virtual machines
- 10 TB of storage
- 1 billion vault transactions
- 10 Shared-Sites / Mobile Services
- 100 million messages Service Bus
- 100 GB SQL Database
- 2 TB traffic per month
The duration of the grant is 1 year, which is quite suitable for our task. It is not clear why we were given only 100 GB of SQL Database. Currently, the maximum possible size of a SQL Database is 150 GB, and SQL Database Premium is 500 GB. Could give more :)
So, if you are working in a research organization, you may well get this grant. As our experience has shown, this is quite realistic; you just need to get together and write an application.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/219635/
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