AWS Public Sector Blog
Category: Amazon EC2
Open data on AWS supports sustainable agricultural practices and crop optimization
With a rapidly growing population, the world is increasingly dependent on the ability to develop and maintain sustainable agriculture and healthy environments. Learn how BASF Digital Farming is leveraging both National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather data hosted on AWS, and commercial weather data, to develop digital solutions to help farmers effectively monitor and manage their fields, and help drive farm sustainability.
Encryption-in-transit for public sector workloads with AWS Nitro Enclaves and AWS Certificate Manager
Government, education, nonprofit, healthcare, and other public sector organizations process and store sensitive data including health records, tax data, PII, student data, criminal justice information, and financial data. These workloads carry stringent security and compliance requirements to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of this data both in transit and at rest. Best practices for protection of data in transit include enforcing appropriately defined encryption requirements, authenticating network communications, and implementing secure key and certificate management systems. In this post, I demonstrate a solution for deploying a highly available and fault tolerant web service with managed certificates and TLS termination performed on customer-managed EC2 Nitro instances using ACM for Nitro Enclaves.
People’s Association in Singapore improves upskilling experiences for communities
People around the world rely on continuing education and upskilling courses to build on their existing knowledge and learn new, industry-specific skills sets. In Singapore, Community Centres (CCs) and Resident Committees (RCs) offer a variety of upskilling courses for residents. CCs and RCs are part of the network of the People’s Association (PA), a Singaporean statutory board with a mission to build and bridge communities. To improve CCs’ and RCs’ time-intensive, manual process of course administration, PA and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), launched a cloud-based web portal in November 2019.
Crowdsourcing a cure for COVID-19: How the cloud and Folding@home are accelerating research and drug discovery
Today more than 200,000 volunteers around the world are helping accelerate research toward COVID-19 therapies—by walking away from their computers. That’s because of a concept called distributed computing, which allows anyone with a home computer, laptop, or virtual machine to contribute computing power to a common cause. This month, nonprofit Folding@home has started sharing one of the world’s largest public protein simulation databases as an AWS Open Data Set so that researchers around the world can easily access this data to speed up the search for therapies for COVID-19.
The Water Institute of the Gulf runs compute-heavy storm surge and wave simulations on AWS
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.
TUM researcher finds new approach to safety-critical systems using parallelized algorithms on AWS
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.
How researchers at The University of Manchester explore magnetic properties of molecules with the AWS Cloud
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.
Upgrade to the newest Amazon EC2 M5 and R5 instances and save
Your workloads have different characteristics and may have evolved over time, making it challenging to support them with high-performing, scalable and low-cost computing. That’s why we’ve added new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances that come with the latest processor technology, to help you optimize your workloads even more and save.
To democratise educational access and experience for millions of students worldwide, CDSM depends on the cloud
CDSM Interactive Solutions Ltd (CDSM), founded in 1998, is a multi-faceted EdTech company that provides bespoke e-learning services and Thinqi, a next generation learning management system (LMS), to the state education sector. We spent some time with two of CDSM’s more senior colleagues, Steve Finch, Head of Marketing, and Darren Wallace, Chief Technical Officer, both of whom have been with CDSM since the early 2000s.
Proteins wiggling and jiggling: The University of Nottingham’s Crossbow project paves a new path for biomolecular research using high-performance computing (HPC) and the cloud
The University of Nottingham has a history dating back to 1881, and while the university is now global with campuses in China and Malaysia, its flagship campus remains in the UK. Today, the university’s research efforts span nearly every discipline. One current project is Crossbow, a new, open source software project conceived and developed by Dr. Christian Suess, a research fellow at The University of Nottingham in conjunction with principal investigator Prof. Charlie Laughton, professor of computational pharmaceutical science. Crossbow is based out of the school of pharmacy at the University of Nottingham, where there is a particular interest in researching the design of new medicines using computer simulations of drugs and proteins.