Google Cloud Platform announces new credits program for researchers

From Big Data projects like Strayer University’s student support system to AI projects like Carnegie Mellon’s socially aware robot, researchers are discovering that cloud technology can help make academic research cheaper, faster, easier, and more secure. Whether you’re just starting out with a new idea, or validating your work before sharing it with the public, we want to help you advance your new discoveries. That’s why we’re deepening our support for your biggest questions and best guesses through a new program: Google Cloud Platform (GCP) research credits. Academic researchers in qualified regions are encouraged to apply.

Like the Google Cloud Platform Education Grants to support computer science courses and the partnership to support National Science Foundation (NSF) grants in BIGDATA, our GCP research credits program supports faculty who want to take advantage of GCP’s data storage, analytics, and machine-learning capabilities. Andrew V. Sutherland, a computational number theorist and Principal Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is one of a growing number of academic researchers who have already made the transition and benefited from GCP. His team moved the L-Functions and Modular Forms Database to GCP because “we are mathematicians who want to focus on our research, and not have to worry about hardware failures or scaling issues with the website.”

Other researchers are taking advantage of GCP’s scalable infrastructure. Ryan Abernathey, Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Ocean and Climate Physics at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, used Google Cloud credits through an NSF partnership and, with his team, developed an open-source platform to manage the complex data sets of climate science. The platform, called Pangeo, can run Earth System Modeling simulations on petabytes of high-resolution, three-dimensional data. “This is the future of what day-to-day science research computing will look like,” he predicts.

At the Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine (SCGPM), researchers using GCP and BigQuery can now run hundreds of genomes through a variant analysis pipeline and get query results quickly. Mike Snyder, director of SCGPM, notes, “We’re entering an era where people are working with thousands or tens of thousands or even million genome projects, and you’re never going to do that on a local cluster very easily. Cloud computing is where the field is going.”

Googlers like Fei-Fei Li, Chief Scientist for Cloud AI and ML, are excited to be able to support important research through the new avenue of the credits program: “As an academic, I’m thrilled that Google Cloud will make GCP credits available to the research community. This will help support important scientific discoveries and accelerate fundamental research that are critical for the future.”