Category: Compute

Efforts to prevent and combat homelessness are limited by the lack of comprehensive data about people experiencing homelessness. This makes it difficult for states to identify trends and emerging needs to respond and make data-driven decisions about the effective deployment of resources. The cloud can help bridge information silos. Read on for examples of how states use the cloud to bridge data silos and better serve the homeless.

The Water Institute of the Gulf runs its storm surge and wave analysis models on Amazon Web Services (AWS)—a task that sometimes requires large bursts of compute power. These models are critical in forecasting hurricane storm surge event (like Hurricane Laura in August 2020), evaluating flood risk for the Louisiana and other coastal states, helping governments prepare for future conditions, and managing the coast proactively.

The concept of a COVID-19 High Performance Computing (HPC) Consortium emerged from a roundtable discussion at the White House in March and included input from industry, government, and academic leaders. Following the announcement of the consortium, AWS has been collaborating with teams on a growing number of projects to provide cloud computing resources from AWS. I want to share three early learnings and insights into some of the innovative projects on which we are collaborating with the world’s leading researchers.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is now generally available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Now government organizations and commercial organizations in government-regulated industries who adopt Kubernetes as their standard for orchestrating containers can use Amazon EKS to deploy a managed Kubernetes cluster on AWS. According to the 2019 Cloud Native Computing Foundation survey of their community, Amazon EKS is the leading method for deploying Kubernetes.

Government customers and commercial organizations in government-regulated industries can now connect their AWS Outposts to the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. With this launch, users in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions can get a consistent AWS experience by accessing the same AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools across on premises and the cloud.

Did you know AWS can help deliver an automated solution for creating the FedRAMP Integrated Inventory Workbook? This workbook needs to be updated and submitted to the FedRAMP Project Management Office (PMO) monthly for continuous monitoring. Automating this workbook saves manual work hours. Any customer going through the FedRAMP authorization process can leverage this workbook. Understand how to gather an inventory of AWS resources from AWS Config data to create the FedRAMP Integrated Inventory Workbook.

Mahmoud Khaled, a PhD student at TUM and a research assistant at LMU, researches how to improve safety-critical systems that require large amounts of compute power. Using AWS, Khaled’s research project, pFaces, accelerates parallelized algorithms and controls computational complexity to speed the time to science. His project findings introduce a new way to design and deploy verified control software for safety-critical systems, such as autonomous vehicles.

Dr. Nicholas Chilton and his research group at The University of Manchester’s Department of Chemistry in the School of Natural Sciences investigate the magnetic properties of molecules for high-density storage, quantum computing, and applications like MRI contrast agents. He turned to the cloud when the university’s onsite HPC cluster couldn’t provide the high-throughput compute power needed to answer his research questions.

To help solve a few challenges I faced with my family, including the need to track the location of a child, I needed a serverless global positioning system (GPS) monitoring solution. Commercial geographic monitoring GPS solutions are not cost-effective because of the cost of digital map licenses from third parties and running servers around the clock. Existing GPS systems work with proprietary GPS devices that lock-in the users’ vendors’ devices. My solution? Build my own serverless GPS monitoring and alerting solution.

The Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance (CGPS) is based at the Wellcome Genome Campus, Cambridge and The Big Data Institute, University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Much of its work involves collaborating with laboratories around the world to enhance genomic surveillance by using big data, engineering, training, and genomic capacity building. Ultimately, the Centre hopes to enable the linking and real-time interpretation of data globally to track pathogens and antimicrobial resistance at an affordable rate. Typically, spikes in cost for research are a common challenge for laboratories. With the cloud, the team wanted to mitigate their costs, and particularly those of their partners in low and middle-income countries, by exploring the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud’s pay-as-you-go infrastructure.