Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced the company will contribute free cloud-computing and research application to medical researchers and practitioners fighting the Ebola virus.

The Redmond-based tech giant launched an Azure-powered research initiative designed to add to research about Ebola during the company's press event in San Francisco on Monday.

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Azure, Microsoft's cloud-based platform for businesses, cnsists of data centers the let users access huge amounts of data and computing power remotely over the Internet.

The company is also starting to accept project proposals that aim to create "a better understanding of the spread and cure of the Ebola virus and its associated factors."

Qualified proposals will be awarded with Azure compute and storage resources to help advance the project.

Microsoft will offer some tools made by Microsoft researchers to aid in vaccine discovery. It also wants this research to be available for the research community.

Along with the tools, Microsoft will also include the new G-series virtual machines and the new Azure Marketplace. The virtual machine has 32TB of storage, which is four times the memory of Google's largest virtual machine, said Microsoft's executive vice president of cloud and enterprise Scott Guthrie.

"Our new G-series virtual machines, along with Premium Storage, will enable customers to run the most demanding workloads in the largest virtual machines available in the public cloud today," Guthrie added.

Meanwhile, Azure Marketplace will let Azure's business customers make and sell apps and services. It will also unveil hundreds of partners such as CoreOS, Oracle, and Cloudera.

Ebola in West Africa has killed more than 4,500 people.

TagsSatya Nadella, apps, Azure, Azure cloud-based platform, Ebola research