I had the pleasure of attending the 22nd Machine Evaluation Workshop in Liverpool.

Please find below a copy of the Microsoft presentation

Additionally please find some technical materials about how the Techila solution. Techila is a middleware plug-in, which enables your applications to securely harness the infinite capacity of the Cloud. The application does not need to be a special HPC application. It can be any regular application like Excel, MATLAB, R, Pearl, Python, Fortan, C/C++ .Net code. When using Techila, you just get access to the results faster.

Typical use cases for Techila and Microsoft Azure

More technical documents and some videos including language-specific tutorials can be found on the Techila web site at: http://www.techilatechnology.com/technology/technology-docs/

Over the past few days I have had lots of question from academic’s in relation to COST the No1 Question being how much will the cloud or more specifically Microsoft Windows Azure cost?

To try and help others struggling with this question here is a quick summary .

Microsoft Windows Azure processor core costs are extremely cost effective for short periods of use. The pricing table below gives the list pricing (this drops by 20% under an Azure Enterprise agreement and there are specific pricing for addition of Azure to EES).

So if your looking to undertake some workload using  128 cores based on small instances, the hourly cost would be $15.36 which is about £10.  The benefit is huge in that you  can literally just pay for a few hours if that is all you need. So you don’t need to make the huge upfront capex and opex investments in terms of some of the following. The time taken between requirement and installation physical resources such as servers, network hardware, software, storage, additional staffing resources, heating, lighting, cooling and power for your equipment.

Windows Azure Storage is metered in units of the average daily amount of data stored (in GB) over a monthly period.

So if you required 10TB you would be looking in the region of £900 per month (before discounts),  which includes making 3 copies of the data for resiliency. It also then becomes readily accessible to supported users. There are also some charges for data transit, but we don’t charge for loading data in, downloads  are $0.15 per GB, so this should stay relatively small unless the whole 10TB is moved about regularly. If your interested in learning more about Windows Azure please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

I have been asked a few questions recently regarding developing Windows Phone apps which can access Sharepoint 2010 resources.

The easy answer is… download the following toolkit on CodePlex, the toolkit will help simplify the task of building Windows Phone 7 applications based upon SharePoint 2010 servers running Forms Based Authentication. This toolkit also allows you to use the same libraries to build Silverlight desktop applications.

This first release requires your SharePoint 2010 installation to support Forms Based authentication but once you do that, building applications is fairly trivial.

This toolkit will allow you to do the following:

1. Authenticate against a Forms Based SharePoint 2010 server.
2. Downloads lists of data from the server.
3. Create built-in, prepackaged filters to limit the data without writing CAML.

Once a list item is selected it’s passed to a data-driven page that correctly renders the form based upon the Meta-Data for that List from the server. This includes formatting and validation. The data can even be updated and added back to the server.

You can download the Toolkit from CodePlex at: http://sharepointwp7.codeplex.com

Today we announced a long list of improvements for Microsoft SkyDrive. W

The improvements are a big step forward especially for the growing number of customers using SkyDrive to share and access Office documents.

Here’s a video that quickly walks you through the changes to the service.

For further details of the improvements see the SkyDrive team blog

C#

Learn to programme in C# over the course of 24 episodes, our friend Bob Tabor from www.LearnVisualStudio.net will teach you the fundamentals of C# programming.

Learn the skills and concepts applicable to video games, mobile environments, and client applications.

The following tutorials and videos walk you through getting the tools, writing code, debugging features, customizations and much more! Each concept is broken into its own video so you can search for and focus on the information you need.

Download the entire series' source code

Watch all 24 Episodes

Learn how researchers are developing games that combine real-world and digital experiences in their quest for a unified game layer for education that improves academic outcomes and enables new types of educational research.

In collaboration with Microsoft Research, a research group comprised of university faculty, staff, and students at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) delved into the everyday travails of college life—from academia to social activities—and developed a real-world game, Just Press Play, which helps students earn a digital reward for the ultimate achievement: collegiate success.

It began with a simple question: “Why can’t students earn digital rewards for being awesome?” A research group comprised of university faculty, staff, and students at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) decided to find out.

To learn more:

· Read the blog

Call for Content: Partner Support for ChronoZoom

ChronoZoom serves as a "master timeline" tying together all kinds of specialized timelines and electronic resources, and aspires to bridge the gap between the humanities and the sciences and to unify all knowledge of the past. We are seeking humanities scholars and scientists from fields like geology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, astronomy, and cosmology to work with us to develop the broadest possible view of the past by providing content to help us build the timelines for the Cosmos, Earth, Life, Pre-Human, and Human histories. If you can support ChronoZoom, please submit relevant content, including videos, images, text, PowerPoint slides, documents, chart data, table data, and Excel data. All content must be available under a Creative Commons license.

Download ChronoZoom

The forthcoming 2011 Daresbury Machine Evaluation Workshop will be held on 29 and 30 November 2011 at a new venue - the Adelphi Hotel Liverpool.

This Workshop is now established as a leading national event dedicated to distributed high performance scientific computing. The principle objective is to encourage close contact between the research communities from the Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics and Materials Programmes of EPSRC and the major vendors of workstations, software and peripherals.

I will be attending the Daresbury Machine Evaluation Workshop (MEW22) in Liverpool next week with Techila and the Microsoft Azure team. We will be presenting a radical proposal to the high-performance computing users in the workshop. Do you know if you or some of your colleagues are planning to attend the workshop? If you will be in Liverpool, we would like to show how you can do MATLAB in the Cloud without any limitations to the performance.

So what is Techila? http://blogs.msdn.com/b/uk_faculty_connection/archive/2011/11/20/matlab-and-r-on-windows-azure-via-techila.aspx

So if your are looking for ways to increase the performance of your existing applications. The Techila middleware is the missing link between applications and the computing capacity. It enables applications to scale and to utilize all available computing capacity efficiently.

A research presentation, which might be of interest to you is by Dr.Lindroos in Northeastern/ TUT. Dr Lindroos uses FORTRAN code wrapped in MATLAB to model superconducting materials. Before Techila, he was able to use low-accuracy models which took 3,5 hours to compute. The inaccuracy of the results lead him also to some incorrect results. With Techila and Windows Azure, he is now able to get 256 times better results in shorter time.  Another nice example of cases, where Techila has enabled unforeseen research is the cancer research case, Techila with the power of Windows Azure enabled scaling an existing MATLAB application to utilize the combined power of 1200 Windows Azure instances. With this speed, the researcher was able to complete his 15-year data analysis project in 4,5 days. A case study about this project available on the Techila site at:

http://www.techilatechnologies.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/New-Power-for-Cancer-Research-from-Cloud-Computing-Techila-and-Azure.pdf

We would love to hear more about your projects and the applications, which you would like to speed up. We are working with a number of Universities and researchers, and are always interested in learning new and to hear about innovative new research projects.

The following article explains how Techila is helping ISVs to utilize cloud capacity easily and securely in their applications. Fennia Life is the first Life Insurance company in the world doing their business-critical simulations on Windows Azure.

http://www.techilatechnologies.com/2011/11/clould-integration-in-insurance/

So if your attending the Daresbury Machine Evaluation Workshop in Liverpool on November 29-30 it would be great to start and demonstrate Live in the workshop sessions how the Windows Azure with Techila solution can assist.

The Windows Azure Tomcat Solution is designed in a way that you can update your Tomcat project outside VS2010 project.

The VS2010 application will be deployed once however whenever you would need to update, Tomcat, Java Run time or your own Tomcat based solution, you can update without updating your Windows Azure application.

This project is based on Startup task in which Tomcat, Java and your project is downloaded from Azure Storage and then installed in Azure VM.

Full source code is available for startup task and solution via : http://tomcatazure.codeplex.com/

For a more details and complete setup guides look here

Resource for Teaching and Learning Windows Phone Development

Windows Phone Programming in C# (Windows Phone Version 7.5)

The main text is provided as a Word document and PDF file. This contains the entire text, broken into chapters.

Demonstrations

The Demos folder contains a folder for each of the chapters that have demonstration programs.

Teaching Content

For each of the chapters there is a folder with the presentations and lab content for that chapter. Each presentation has a corresponding folder containing the demonstrations for that chapter. The demonstration slides contain step by step instructions in the slide notes. Not all the demonstrations have sample projects associated with them, for these demonstrations the program will be created during the presentation. The first 9 chapters also have a lab document which contains a set of lab exercises for that chapter. Some of the lab documents also have answer documents.

The following chapters are covered in this material:

Windows Phone

The Windows Phone Platform
The Windows Phone Ecosystem
Windows Phone Program Execution
Windows Phone Application Development

Introduction to Silverlight

Program Design with Silverlight
Understanding XAML
Creating a Silverlight Application

Visual Studio Solution Management

Getting Started with Projects and Solutions
Debugging Programs
Performance Tuning

Constructing a Program with Silverlight

Improving the User Experience
Data Manipulation and Display
Managing Application Page Layout
Displaying Lists of Data
Pages and Navigation
Using ViewModel Classes

Isolated Storage on Windows Phone

Storing Data on Windows Phone

Using Databases on Windows Phone

An Overview of Database Storage
Creating Data Relationships with LINQ

Networking with Windows Phone

Networking Overview
Creating a User Datagram Protocol (UDP) Connection
Creating a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) Connection
Connecting to a Data Source
Using LINQ to Read from an XML Stream
Using Network Services

XNA on Windows Phone

XNA in Context
Making an XNA Program
Player Interaction in Games
Adding Sound to a Game
Playing Sound in a Silverlight Program
Managing Screen Dimensions and Orientation
Combining XNA and Silverlight

Creating Windows Phone Applications

The Windows Phone Icons and Splash Screens
Fast Application Switching
Launchers and Choosers
Background Processing

Windows Phone Marketplace

Preparing an Application for Sale
Distributing Windows Phone Applications and Games
Making your Application Stand Out
What to do Next

Download this resource here