Oracle for Research is a unique program, built to support the work of scientific researchers. Many of the people on our team have a background in research, and we have a deep understanding of the research process. At our core, we believe technology shouldn’t hinder research, and we’re here to help you navigate and, where possible, simplify the increasingly complex landscape surrounding computational research. We want to help you store, manage, and analyze your data to help you reach scientific results and conclusions faster.
When researchers enroll in any of our award programs, they receive dedicated, personalized technical support to help them get up and running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) so they can start accelerating their research in the cloud. Recipients of our Oracle for Research Project, Doctoral Project, and Fellows Program awards receive a range of additional benefits. These include a grant of Oracle Cloud credits, sized specifically to support the researcher’s project requirements, that can be used to access a variety of technology offerings, products, and services. We also offer opportunities to engage with our research-dedicated marketing team to promote research outputs and to meet other researchers within the program.
Other cloud providers may grant you credits you can put toward using their cloud, but that’s often the extent of their support. We partner with you to take you beyond the technology and walk step-by-step with you along the entire research journey. We offer a collaborative environment, and we’re truly invested in your research outputs and achievements—we want to see you succeed. With the exception of recipients of our Oracle for Research Cloud Starter Awards, award recipients can participate in scheduled, regular meetings with their dedicated research advocate and solutions architect to ensure they’re supported throughout their award period.
We work with scientific researchers across all disciplines—including digital humanities—in academic intuitions as well as commercial researchers.
Oracle is headquartered in Austin, Texas, but we are a global company and work with researchers in many time zones. Email us at OracleForResearch_ww@oracle.com if you have questions about your region.
We work with researchers from a variety of industries and verticals. While some of our programs and products are limited to only academic and nonprofit researchers, we strive to help all scientific researchers, no matter the institution.
Students looking for hands-on experience with Oracle Cloud are invited to try our Oracle Cloud Free Tier.
Additionally, in the UK only, we support PhD students through our Oracle for Research Doctoral Project Awards. To be eligible for this award, applicants must have attended one of our Doctoral Outreach Training Initiative sessions on cloud basics. See the “Grants and Awards” section for further information.
There are no hidden fees or commitments. At the end of your project award grant period, you have three options.
Contact your research advocate to discuss next steps as your account expiration date approaches.
No. We do not require any credit card details in order to set up a research tenancy through any of our award programs. Each of our awards provides a predetermined number of Oracle Cloud credits, which are preloaded in your tenancy. There is no penalty or charge when the credits are depleted. Please see the answer to the question “Are there any hidden fees or commitments? What happens to my data after my project grant ends?” for more details regarding what happens to your tenancy after your award period expires.
The standard contract period for all our award programs is 12 months. If your project requires additional time, please email us at OracleForResearch_ww@oracle.com or discuss options with your research advocate or solutions architect.
Yes, please include the following standard statement in any publications, press releases, or websites: “This work was supported in part by Oracle Cloud credits and related resources provided by the Oracle for Research program.”
Data security is of the utmost importance to us. Whether you’re trying to keep your sensitive data secure in compliance with specific restrictions or protections, such as GDPR or HIPAA, or you need to keep your data within strict geographic boundaries, or you just want to make sure your data is safe, we meet your requirements. Oracle is a pre-eminent technology vendor; our cloud is designed with a security-first architecture. We prioritize data management and security, enabling you to run your mission-critical research workloads and store your data with confidence. For more information, please review our Privacy Policies.
You or your licensors retain all ownership and intellectual property rights in and to your content as defined in the Oracle Cloud Services Agreement. Please click the link and review the agreement applicable to your region for more details.
Please email us at OracleForResearch_ww@oracle.com.
Oracle for Research Cloud Starter Awards grant researchers US$1,000 in Oracle Cloud credits to put toward their choice of cloud storage, database, and service offerings, such as (but not limited to)
This US$1,000 credit helps researchers get started and quickly host, process, analyze, and collaborate around their research data on Oracle Cloud. Cloud Starter Awards are typically used for smaller-scale projects; they’re an ideal way to become comfortable using OCI and to see if our offerings meet your larger requirements.
Oracle for Research Project Awards are grants of Oracle Cloud credits, sized specifically for a defined research project of up to 12 months in duration. Credits may be used on the vast majority of our OCI products and services to facilitate your research. These awards open the door to a deeper relationship with our team, offering dedicated hands-on support throughout your project and a variety of additional opportunities. We will introduce you to peers in our program to foster collaboration, offer assistance in coauthoring or publishing papers, and help you share your discoveries with a broader audience.
See our Cloud Services Agreements page for details specific to your region.
Our Doctoral Project Awards are very similar to our standard Project Awards (see above), but they’re designed specifically for PhD students in the UK. These awards support a 12-month portion of a larger PhD project by providing Oracle Cloud credits to carry out computational work. Benefits for researchers, in addition to those listed for our standard Project Awards, include support from the Oracle for Research team to help recipients deliver an internal research seminar and an invitation to Oracle for Research Doctoral Seminar day events to present their work and network with our postgraduate research community and their colleagues.
To be eligible for this award, applicants must have attended one of our Doctoral Outreach and Training Initiative one-day sessions on cloud basics. Please see the relevant question about training below.
Yes. We run the Doctoral Outreach and Training Initiative, which is currently available to PhD students in the UK. These free sessions can be arranged for groups of 10 to 30 PhD students in the UK through departments, schools, centers for doctoral training, and doctoral training partnerships. These sessions include a lecture on foundational cloud computing concepts, the core components of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and why you might want to use OCI for research. Each attendee will be granted a Cloud Starter Award (see the relevant information above) to use in a hands-on workshop to put into practice the concepts described in the lecture.
We offer a more advanced initiative for researchers, called the Oracle for Research Project Award program, where we fully support you, end-to-end, along every stage of the research process. Members receive additional computational resources like data storage, compute, and networking, but it goes beyond just the tech.
Our team provides hands-on consultations and workshops with our solutions architects, introduces you to peers for collaborative opportunities, assists in coauthoring and publishing papers, and generates awareness for your discoveries by amplifying them to a broad audience.
We give you your own, hands-on customer service representative.
And, for select researchers, we also provide fellowships and build collaborative computational research centers.
As a next step towards exploring deeper partnership, we recommend applying formally via this link.
The Oracle for Research Fellows Program is a competitive program that offers all the benefits of a standard Project Award (as outlined above) as well as a cash award and additional marketing benefits. This program is targeted at researchers in any discipline who are carrying out world-leading, cutting-edge work that can make use of cloud computing and that will have a positive impact in the world.
For full information about the Fellows Program, please review the Fellows Program web page and see the dedicated FAQ section below.
The Cloud Starter Award currently grants researchers a flat US$1,000 credit to put toward their choice of cloud storage, database, and service offerings.
Award each offer a number of cloud credits based on the research project’s needs. Each project is assessed via conversations with the researcher to determine a suitable grant size for their project.
Oracle Open Data enables researchers to connect with the most-trusted scientific databases in the world—and dramatically increase the pace of discovery. With Oracle Cloud, get instant access to insights from AlphaFold, GOES, Landsat, MODIS, PDB, ZINC, and more.
So whether you’re conducting single-cell analysis and sequencing, exploring images via augmented or virtual reality, tapping into computational pattern recognition, or visualizing data from language patterns, fast and easy access to these shared, open datasets will help you get started quickly.
Additionally, Oracle Open Data is now accepting data contributions from researchers and institutions interested in sharing data with a wide community of users. Make data available to the public domain at no cost, and help us drive collaboration across the scientific community.
Yes, you can seamlessly incorporate open source tools (for example, NAMD, Python, Rosetta, Slurm, TensorFlow, and many more) into your Oracle Cloud account. Oracle for Research’s cloud offerings also work with many different programming languages. Whether your organization has built your data environment with C, Java, Linux (CentOS, RHEL, Ubuntu, and so on), Python, or R, we can bridge the gaps without you needing to learn new languages.
Also, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is a bring-your-own-license (BYOL) cloud. Therefore, you’re able to use any software you have a license for (for example, Amber, MATLAB, MolStar, PyTorch, R, SAS, and many others).
While we support GPUs, each project is considered on a case-by-case basis. If your project requires GPUs, please email us at OracleForResearch_ww@oracle.com.
We specialize in a range of platform and infrastructure offerings across analytics, application development, artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML), big data, cloud security, data integration and migration, data observability and systems management, data science, database services, storage, and many more.
We partner with a variety of technology and software vendors, and we try to offer as much choice as possible. Whether you use OpenNebula, GraalVM, or another tool or platform, we’re ready to support you. Oracle Cloud plugs into a vast cloud app marketplace, which offers access to Folding@Home, Kinetica, the NVIDIA GPU Cloud, and many other areas.
We partner with a variety of different organizations. For example, we’re a member of Internet2’s trusted, secure network of providers that offer cloud solutions, research support, and services. We also regularly sponsor events in support of the Society of Research Software Engineering.
Yes. We offer next-generation products, including autonomous databases and analytics with out-of-the-box, built-in machine learning and AI capabilities.
Many of our scientists prefer open source or open data options for their research. As Red Hat is sunsetting CentOS, we’re seeing an increase in customers migrating over to the Oracle Linux platform. It may be a viable option for you.
We’re here to help you set up your research cloud tenancy for the first time.
We carry out a dedicated onboarding session with you and any of your colleagues who will be using OCI with an Oracle for Research Project Award. We follow this up with regular checkpoint calls and are available to assist with questions and support as you use OCI.
In addition, a plethora of OCI documentation and material is available. Check out this how-to blog on getting started with your cloud tenancy.
We’re ready to help you with any data migration needs. Our onboarding sessions include a discussion about how to get any data you need into OCI. In addition, check out this blog on moving research data to Oracle Cloud.
We want to make sure our researchers have an optimal setup, so we’ve created easy-to-use diagnostic tools to rightsize their cloud environments.
We encourage researchers to raise tech issues with their solutions architects in the first instance. If they require further support, we will advise researchers to use their assigned customer support identifier to file a support request with My Oracle Support.
Yes. When we build for researchers, we’re committed to doing all we can to help them analyze, automate, publish, standardize, and track their scientific data in a reproducible way. Security and consistency are our cornerstones.
The grant should be used as described in the project application. Common uses include funding students or staff, conference travel, and lab upgrades, though other uses have also been identified.
The value of the Oracle Cloud credits awarded varies by project based on the computing needs described in the project application. Our goal is to provide sufficient Oracle Cloud credits to cover all the work described in the project application to assist the researcher to completion.
TThe Oracle for Research Fellows Program supports basic, applied, and translational research across all disciplines. The strongest applications are for projects doing novel work, that have the potential to significantly advance the state of knowledge in the field, that will receive significant benefit through access to Oracle Cloud, and that will have a wide-ranging, positive impact in the world. Interdisciplinary and cross-institutional projects are welcome; the lead principal investigator (PI) must meet eligibility requirements (PDF), and the award will be made to the lead PI’s institution.
While there is no page limit, the strongest applications will provide a summary project description that contextualizes the project; explains complex or specialized science or other information for nonexperts; explains the work and how the funds and Oracle Cloud credits will be used; and describes the potential impact of the project. Detailed descriptions of tactical activities within the project are not required. In most cases, a successful “Project Details” section is at most two pages or three to five paragraphs.
Yes; however, if you’re not selected in the previous submission cycle, it may be worth revisiting your application.
The Oracle for Research Fellows Program includes direct research funding, computational resources, technical support, and various other kinds of assistance a researcher may need.
A researcher may only send in one application per Oracle Fellowship cycle.
Each application goes through an in-depth review by our internal Fellows Program review committee and panel.
Please submit a CV or biosketch and a completed Oracle for Research Fellows Program application detailing the proposed use of funding and its value to the research project, your institution, the larger research community, and Oracle.
Researchers will receive PR and marketing support from Oracle to create visibility for their project at the time of the award, throughout the project, and following the publication of their research results.
Refer to the Fellows Program page and review the current Fellows Program schedule for more information about when we accept applications.