Microsoft Pushes Windows Azure Capabilities With Project Daytona

Microsoft is offering a look at Daytona at its annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit this week at the company's Redmond, Wash., headquarters

Windows Azure is a key component of Microsoft's cloud strategy.

At the company's Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles last week Microsoft executives touted Azure's capabilities and urged solution provider partners to add the cloud computing platform to their product lineups.

The three-day Faculty Summit is Microsoft's vehicle for collaborating with scientists and researchers at universities and in government and industry.

MapReduce supports distributed computing on large data sets on clusters of computers. It breaks down complex data processing problems across distributed systems and reassembles the results.

Daytona is a toolset for building MapReduce applications that run on the Azure platform, deploying the iterative MapReduce runtime to all Windows Azure virtual machines in a network.

The toolset is designed to run a broad range of analytics and machine-learning algorithms on Windows Azure.

Project Daytona was developed by Microsoft's eXtreme Computing Group, which was formed in 2009, as part of the group's Cloud Research Engagement Initiative.