The National Science Foundation and the Microsoft Corporation have agreed to offer American scientific researchers free access to the company’s new cloud computing service.

Ed Lazowska, a University of Washington computer scientist who works with the Microsoft researchers, said the explosion of data being collected by scientists had transformed the staffing needs of the typical scientific research program on campus from a half-time graduate student one day a week to a full-time employee dedicated to managing the data. He said such exponential growth in cost was increasingly hampering scientific research.