Microsoft

Rack-scale computers are dense clusters with hundreds of micro-servers per rack. Designed for data center workloads, they can have significant power, cost and performance benefits over current racks. The rack network can be distributed, with small packet switches embedded on each processor as part of a system-on-chip (SoC) design. Ingress/egress traffic is forwarded by SoCs that have direct uplinks to the data center. Such fabrics are not fully provisioned and the chosen topology and uplink placement impacts performance for different workloads. XFabric is a rack-scale network that reconfigures the topology and uplink placement using a circuit-switched physical layer over which SoCs perform packet switching. To satisfy tight power and space requirements in the rack, XFabric does not use a single large circuit switch, instead relying on a set of independent smaller circuit switches. This introduces partial reconfigurability, as some ports in the rack cannot be connected by a circuit. XFabric optimizes the physical topology and manages uplinks, efficiently coping with partial reconfigurability. It significantly outperforms static topologies and has a performance similar to fully reconfigurable fabrics. We demonstrate the benefits of XFabric using flow-based simulations and a prototype built with electrical crosspoint switch ASICs.

VideoCube allows one to load an AVI movie file as a volume, and play back the movie sampling space and time in different ways. It also provides a single cutting plane for interactively viewing single spacetime slices of the video.

StereoMatcher is an implementation of some commonly used two-frame stereo matching algorithms. It also contains code to evaluate the quality of a computed depth map relative to a ground truth image.

Pan is an experimental embedded language and compiler for image synthesis and manipulation, based on principles from functional programming.

Pan is an experimental embedded language and compiler for image synthesis and manipulation, based on principles from functional programming.

Mppt is an add-in for PowerPoint that allows a presenter to multicast PowerPoint slides, including animations and effects, to a group of viewers.

Mping is a simple command line application that sends and receives multicast packets.

JCLUSTER is a fast simple clustering program that produces hierarchical, binary branching, tree structured clusters.

Fran is a Haskell library (or "embedded language") for interactive animations with 2D and 3D graphics and sound.

Fuel cells are a promising power source for future data centers, offering high energy efficiency, low greenhouse gas emissions, and high reliability. However, due to mechanical limitations related to fuel delivery, fuel cells are slow to adjust to sudden increases in data center power demands, which can result in temporary power shortfalls. To mitigate the impact of power shortfalls, prior work has proposed to either perform power capping by throttling the servers, or by leveraging energy storage devices (ESDs) that can temporarily provide enough power to make up for the shortfall while the fuel cells ramp up power generation. Both approaches have disadvantages: power capping conservatively limits server performance and can lead to service level agreement (SLA) violations, while ESD-only solutions must significantly overprovision energy storage capacity to tolerate the shortfalls caused by worst-case (i.e., largest) power surges, which greatly increases the total cost of ownership (TCO). We propose SizeCap, the first ESD sizing framework for fuel cell powered data centers, which coordinates ESD sizing with power capping to allow data centers to employ a cost-effective solution to power shortfalls. SizeCap sizes the ESD just large enough to cover the majority of power surges, but not the worst-case surges that occur infrequently, to greatly reduce TCO. It then uses the smaller capacity ESD in conjunction with power capping to cover the power shortfalls caused by worst-case power surges. As part of our new flexible framework, we propose multiple power capping policies with different degrees of awareness of fuel cell and workload behavior, and evaluate their impact on workload performance and ESD size. Using traces from production data center systems, we demonstrate that SizeCap significantly reduces the ESD size (by 85% for a workload with infrequent yet large power surges, and by 50% for a workload with frequent power surges) without violating any SLAs.

The IPv6/IPv4 translator converts packets between the IPv6 and IPv4 protocol formats.

The Microsoft Research IPv6 tunnel broker service is a web interface plug-in for Internet Information Server (IIS), provided by Microsoft Research to ISPs, which allows remote users to gain access to an IPv6 tunnel service provided by a suitably capable router. The router need not be co-located with the web server. Details of the tunnels, and the users, are kept in a database for ISP management purposes.

Prototype IPv6 stack for Windows NT and Windows 2000, for research, educational, and testing purposes only.

Prototype IPv6 stack for Windows NT and Windows 2000, for research, educational, and testing purposes only.

The WinMine Toolkit contains a set of tools that allow you to build statistical models from data.

MSBNx is a component-based Windows application for creating, assessing, and evaluating Bayesian Networks.

This data is being released for research purposes only. The DESM Word Embeddings dataset may include terms that some may consider offensive, indecent or otherwise objectionable. Microsoft has not reviewed or modified the content of the dataset. Microsoft is providing this dataset as a convenience and is not responsible or liable for any inappropriate content resulting from your use of the dataset. Use of the dataset is at your own risk and discretion. Please contact the paper authors with questions.

This data set identifies 38M tweets collected for the analysis of social media messages related to the 2012 U.S. Presidential election. The data set provides tweet IDs for tweets containing the words "obama", "romney", or both (case-insensitive matching) during the period from July 1, 2012 through November 7, 2012. The paper, “Online and Social Media Data As an Imperfect Continuous Panel Survey.” PLoS ONE 11(1): e0145406 by Diaz et al. provides further description of the dataset.

Now that SharePoint Designer 2007 is available as a free download, you have even more options for customizing your SharePoint Server sites.