In the video below, David Heckerman, Distinguished Scientist, Microsoft Research, talks about the work he and his team conducted using data from the genome-wide association study (GWAS). Their goal is to find associations between genetics, disease and responsiveness to drugs.

[View:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ48LXsXjTo&hd=1]

As David explains, “With Windows Azure, we have the infrastructure to do the computations that would normally take years in just a few hours.” His team conducted a 27,000-core run on Windows Azure to crunch data from this study. With the nodes busy for 72 hours, 1 million tasks were consumed—the equivalent of approximately 1.9 million compute hours. If the same computation had been run on an 8-core system, it would have taken 25 years to complete.

Here are links to the original blog post and case study for a more in-depth description of the project.