AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure have each committed up to $3m in cloud services to the US National Science Foundation (NSF) over the next three years, going towards a large scale data science research project.

The Bigdata program, also known as the ’critical techniques, technologies and methodologies for advancing foundations and applications of big data sciences and engineering program,’ will seek to develop new data management and modeling techniques, big data analysis tools, and means of addressing domain science and engineering issues.

National Science Foundation headquarters, Alexandria, VA
National Science Foundation headquarters, Alexandria, VA – Google Maps

Scaling up

The publicly funded NSF set $30m aside for the project, which it hopes will bring advances in computer science, statistics, mathematics, but also behavioral sciences, education, biology, physics and engineering.

The cloud companies’ input, it states, will provide the means for “large scale experimentation and scalability studies.”

“NSF’s participation with major cloud providers is an innovative approach to combining resources to better support data science research,” said Jim Kurose, assistant director of NSF for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) division.

“This type of collaboration enables fundamental research and spurs technology development and economic growth in areas of mutual interest to the participants, driving innovation for the long-term benefit of our nation.”

The foundation has called for future collaboration with cloud companies on other ongoing projects.