The US Treasury re-designed the treasury.gov Web site to improve constituent engagement and internal collaboration. The Web site utilizes Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and "provides a robust workflow and collaboration capability that empowers over a hundred Treasury content owners to make updates at the individual office level as opposed to relying on a centralized departmental web team." In addition, the new Treasury.gov has the "modern capabilities expected in such a critical, public-facing Web channel and allows the agency to better communicate with the public in a more open and transparent manner."

In April 2010, the DOE launched the Open Energy Information Initiative website, a free, open source knowledge sharing platform created to accelerate the transition to clean energy systems. OpenEI.org is hosted on AWS and follows guidelines set by the White House’s Open Government Initiative, which focuses on transparency, collaboration, and participation. OpenEI chose AWS because of our flexibility, scalability, and availability.

The United States Department of State and its prime contractor, MetroStar Systems, built an online video contest platform to encourage discussion and participation around cultural topics, and to promote membership in its ExchangesConnect network. The contest drew participants from more than 160 countries and took advantage of AWS’s scalability using Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, and Elastic Load Balancing.

The Department's Food and Nutrition Service implemented an ESRI GIS (Geographic Information Systems) mapping solution to increase citizen engagement. Their website is designed to help recipients find local stores that welcome Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. The tool helps SNAP recipients make informed decisions about where to shop, thus empowering healthy food choices. The department found that AWS provided a flexible, cost-effective platform that allows agencies to host complex solutions with minimal lead time.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) uses Amazon's cluster compute environment to process high resolution satellite images that provide guidance and situational awareness to its robots. To streamline processing, JPL relies on Amazon Cluster Compute Cloud Instances and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to deploy massive computations with less effort.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Program for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington, DC. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was able to leverage the AWS cloud to rapidly provision capacity and successfully deliver engaging experiences of missions to Mars to fans around the world.

The Data User Elements Program collects data about the planet that is used by various agencies and organizations around the world. The program houses some of its data and end-user products in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). In addition, the program uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to analyze its service usage statistics.

“Using AWS for our Web 2.0 Application Development courses has been a phenomenal resource. Administration was so easy that students were able to get their projects deployed quickly, and venture capitalists attending the final project demos were impressed at the level of polish and creativity that a small student team could produce in just a few weeks.”

—Armando Fox, Adjunct Associate Professor, University of California at Berkeley

“Translational Science is a fast paced activity that spans whole genome sequencing to clinical interpretation of individual SNPs with an ultimate objective of validation and assimilation of newly discovered genetic and molecular knowledge and tests into the clinical enterprise. My lab (lpm.hms.harvard.edu) and our collaborators take advantage of the Amazon Web Services flexibility to conduct a broad range of ‘experiments’ in translational science hosted by Dennis Wall and myself at the Center for Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School.”

—Peter J. Tonellato, Ph.D., Center for Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School

“AWS is a great fit for 3 Day Startup, an event where 40 student entrepreneurs take a web startup from the drawing board to a launched prototype in 60 intense hours. With Amazon”s EC2 and Amazon’s S3 technology on our side, we can go live in minutes without worrying about configuration, reliability, and most importantly, scalability.”

—Thomas Finsterbusch, PhD candidate, the University of Texas, Austin

“In fall 2008, we moved Harvard’s introductory computer science course, CS 50, into the cloud. Rather than continue to rely on our own instructional computing infrastructure on campus, we created a load-balanced cluster of virtual machines for our 330 students within Amazon EC2. Our goals were both technical and pedagogical. As computer scientists, we wanted more control over our course’s infrastructure (e.g., root access), so that we ourselves could install software at will and respond to problems at any hour. As teachers, we wanted easier access to our students’ work as well as the ability to grow and shrink our infrastructure as problem sets’ computational requirements demanded. But we also wanted to integrate into the course’s own syllabus discussion of scalability, virtualization, multi-core processing, and cloud computing itself. What better way to teach topics like those than to have students actually experience them.”

—David J. Malan, Lecturer on Computer Science, Harvard University

“The Malaria Atlas Project is an ambitious collaboration between international malaria scientists with one specific aim: to make detailed global maps of malaria to help drive the fight against the disease. The Malaria Atlas project team has already defined the transmission limits (the boundary of malaria‚s geographic extent), and have recently published the most detailed global maps of risk ever produced. The next goal is to map how malaria‚s burden of death and disease varies across the globe — current knowledge is surprisingly patchy and this hampers efforts to target funds and resources to the people that need them most. “All models use top-end spatial statistics, and these don‚t come cheap when you’re mapping things down to 5×5km pixels across the whole world. Up to now, computation and storage have been major restrictions, placing constraints on the models we‚re able to run. Our research grant from Amazon Web Services means we now have access to the kind of serious parallel processing that we need to implement model runs in feasible timescales and the storage to deal with the massive model output.”

—Dr. Pete Gething, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford

“Project Olympus is a new initiative designed to create and sustain Next Generation Computing innovation for Western Pennsylvania. Our vertical search engine spider is a time-sensitive application that requires bursts of increased computing power. Amazon Web Services helped us quickly leverage the power of cloud computing to meet the demands of our project.”

—David E. Chen, undergraduate student studying Information Systems and Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University

“The generous grant we have received from the AWS in Education program will dramatically increase the reach of my student group’s collaboration with the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) to develop distributed assistive computer vision technology for the visually impaired.”

—Serge Belongie, Associate Professor, University of California, San Diego

“The adoption of elastic storage with Amazon S3 at Stanford is a strategic development in achieving and maintaining a significantly improved data and security environment which highly leverages current state-of-the-art cost-effective technologies in an easily accessible and manageable framework.”

—Horace Greeley, Systems Group, Stanford University

“AWS gives our MS in Analytics and computer science student’s access to resources that would otherwise be difficult to fund at a school of our size. Moreover, the management console makes it really easy for instructors to manage resources for the students. Finally, DynamoDB lets us build NoSQL databases that would not fit on a student machine and Elastic MapReduce means we don’t have to struggle with installing Hadoop.”

—Prof. Terence Parr, parrt@cs.usfca.edu, Graduate Program Director in Computer Science