Microsoft has announced its purchase of Cycle Computing, its latest acquisition to boost its cloud platform, after buying Cloudyn a few weeks ago. While Cloudyn focused on helping customers to analyze and optimize their cloud investments, Cycle's main areas of expertise are High-Performance Computing and other Big Compute cloud capabilities.
Jason Zander, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Azure, explained:
Azure has a massive global footprint and, more than any other major cloud provider. It also has powerful infrastructure, InfiniBand support for fast networking and state-of-the-art GPU capabilities. Combining the most specialized Big Compute infrastructure available in the public cloud with Cycle Computing’s technology and years of experience with the world’s largest supercomputers, we open up many new possibilities.
Zander noted that Microsoft's acquisition of Cycle will help customers transition more quickly to the cloud, and described the company's "depth and expertise around massively scalable applications" as a good fit with Azure's existing offerings. "Their technology will further enhance our support of Linux HPC workloads and make it easier to extend on-premise workloads to the cloud," he added.
Cycle Computing CEO Jason Stowe said that Microsoft's Azure team "share our vision of bringing Big Compute to the world: to solve our customers’, and frequently humanity’s most challenging problems through the use of cloud HPC."
Yesterday, Microsoft announced the launch of two new Azure regions in Australia in the first half of 2018, bringing the worldwide total to 42, which it says is "more than any other cloud provider".
