Microsoft Acquires Cycle Computing To Boost High-Performance Computing With Azure

Microsoft Tuesday announced the acquisition of a cloud computing orchestration firm, Cycle Computing, that's intended to help bolster its Azure cloud platform.

Greenwich, Conn.-based Cycle Computing provides access to high-performance computing power through the use of resources in the public cloud. The company's focus has been on enabling simulations, analytics and other data-intensive workloads.

The acquisition of Cycle Computing and combination with Azure will "open up many new possibilities," Microsoft said in a blog post.

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"Most importantly, Cycle Computing will help customers accelerate their movement to the cloud, and make it easy to take advantage of the most performant and compliant infrastructure available in the public cloud today," Microsoft said.

Microsoft didn't announce any terms of the acquisition.

Cycle Computing was founded in 2005, and raised its first outside funding round in July 2016.

Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft said that Cycle Computing's experience with massively scalable applications helped to drive the acquisition.

Microsoft plans to use the acquired technology to enhance its support of Linux high-performance computing (HPC) workloads and more easily extend on-premise workloads to Azure, the company said.

"We're psyched to be joining the Azure team precisely because they share our vision of bringing Big Compute to the world: to solve our customers', and frequently humanity's most challenging problems through the use of cloud HPC," Cycle Computing CEO Jason Stowe wrote in a blog post.