Cloud Systems Futures
We accelerate getting research into reality, to build tomorrow’s cloud.
We are a multi-disciplinary team of scientists and engineers. Together we imagine and build systems for the sustainable cloud, with a goal of empowering the widest number of people, now and in the future.
Our story
Right from the start, we’ve been ambitious in our research. In the early days we focused purely on Computer Systems and Networking. For example, we made home networks easier to set up, and developed new techniques to analyze the performance of search engines like Bing.
We realized that exciting research happens at the intersection of several fields, where we apply techniques and understanding across disciplines. To maximize these cross-disciplinary intersections we hired a diverse team of incredibly talented electronics engineers, ML experts, physicists, optical scientists, and laser experts.
Today our team is set up to imagine a radically different future and turn new ideas into reality. We design custom parts in CAD and produce them on our CNC machines and 3D printers. We design digital and analog electronics and build the boards in-house.
We build elegant optical beam lines in our world-class lab space, which includes clean-rooms and vibration-isolated optical tables. We are at the forefront of cloud computing and deeply understand the system challenges of operating at vast scale.
Together these unique capabilities allow us to rapidly innovate, prototype, and iterate towards the best solutions. We tackle some of the hardest problems and achieve novel yet pragmatic solutions.
Our core values
Our ambition is bold.
When we look for new challenges, we tackle those where we hope to make the biggest impact.
We are collaborative.
We have a problem-solving mentality. As part of a deeply technical community of experts, we help each other overcome hurdles and search for elegant solutions.
We are focused.
We work in areas which will help Microsoft and its customers.
Join us
We are committed to advancing the state of the art in basic research by developing prototype systems to demonstrate what’s possible.
Could your skills and enthusiasm help?
Recent progress
Project Silica
Not all data is equal: some has particularly high value and must be archived safely. This includes movies, concert performances, medical records and diagnostics scans.
Project Silica is developing a system for such archival data, using glass as a durable, low-cost and environmentally-friendly solution.
We are rethinking storage systems from the ground up to exploit the properties of glass and create a sustainable and secure system for archival storage.
Silica uses ultrafast lasers to write data, creating durable modifications in glass platters. We read using regular light and fast cameras, while the mechanical design of the media library is based on novel low-power robots which give much better system performance.
Project AIM
Optimization problems are among the hardest and most valuable problems for computers to solve. Examples include: managing logistics for goods delivery, VM assignments to hardware in a datacenter, and financial portfolio optimization.
However, digital computers are a poor match for these problems. Instead, we represent the problem in the analog domain by using the interaction of light waves.
By building carefully-chosen feedback loops using light, we can solve these kinds of optimization problems at the speed of light.
This makes it much faster than digital computing methods while also uses less power, improving sustainability.