Microsoft Corp. is looking to make its Azure cloud platform more appealing for scientific projects and other complex workloads.

To that end, the technology giant today said it has acquired Cycle Computing LLC, a Connecticut-based firm focused on harnessing cloud infrastructure for high-performance applications. Its flagship CycleCloud toolkit is used by the likes of NASA, Novartis International AG and Pacific Life Insurance Co. to power internal projects.

A big reason for the software’s popularity is a built-in template creation engine that automates much of the work normally involved in setting up a cloud environment. A company’s operations team can specify what infrastructure is needed for a project, and CycleCloud will quickly provision the necessary resources from its cloud platform of choice. It will then continuously adjust the deployment according to the hardware needs of the application on top.

The resulting efficiency improvements can greatly benefit the large-scale research and financial projects that Cycle Computing helps support. Jason Stowe, the company’s chief executive officer, provided a real-world example in an interview (below) in a 2014 interview on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE studio.

He detailed how storage equipment maker HGST Inc. had used CycleCloud during the development of a hard drive product. The company simulated over a million different design variations on Amazon Web Services to find the best configuration. “It was 60,000-plus hours of computing to do this, it would’ve taken a month in-house,” Stowe said. “Instead we spun up a 70,000-core cluster on top of AWS, ran that workload in eight hours and got it done for $5,594.”

Organizations that currently run CycleCloud on AWS and Google Cloud Platform will continue to receive technical support in the wake of today’s acquisition. However, a Microsoft spokesperson told ZDNet that future releases of the software will only work with Azure. The company plans to take an active role in helping users migrate to its platform.

The client accounts that Microsoft is gaining through the deal should prove valuable on the long run. In a blog post published this morning, Cycle Computing’s Stowe wrote his company has a “customer base that spends $50-100 million annually on cloud infrastructure.”

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. It comes three months Microsoft picked up Hexadite Ltd. in a $100 million deal likewise designed to bolster Azure. The Israeli startup has developed a security platform that uses artificial intelligence to help companies find potential threats in their cloud environments.

Image: Microsoft