Category: High Performance Computing

On October 24, 2024, the White House released a National Security Memorandum (NSM) on Artificial Intelligence (AI), which focuses on ensuring US leadership in developing advanced AI technologies. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is uniquely positioned to address the critical needs of the defense and national security customers in advancing their AI capabilities. Our comprehensive suite of AI and high performance computing (HPC) capabilities offers flexible and robust solutions to meet the NSM’s goals and empower national security missions.

In January 2020, Amazon Web Services (AWS) inaugurated a Cloud Innovation Centre (CIC) at the University of British Columbia (UBC). The CIC uses emerging technologies to solve real-world problems and has produced more than 50 prototypes in sectors like healthcare, education, and research. The Centre’s work has involved 300-plus AWS accounts across various groups, including external collaborators, UBC staff, students, and researchers. This post discusses the management of AWS in higher education institutions, emphasizing governance to securely foster innovation without compromising security and detailing policies and responsibilities for managing AWS accounts across projects and research.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) works with higher education institutions, research labs, and researchers around the world to offer cost-effective, scalable, and secure compute, storage, and database capabilities to accelerate time to science. In our work with research leaders and stakeholders, users often ask us about best practices for leveraging cloud for research. In this post, we dive into five common questions we field from research leaders as they build the academic research innovation centers of the future.

In 2022, Emory launched the AI.Humanity initiative to explore the societal impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) and influence its future development to serve humanity. Emory aims to be a leading advocate for ethical use of AI and a top destination for students and faculty seeking to understand and apply its transformative technologies. Read this blog post to learn how Emory uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support the computing needs of AI.Humanity.

Japan’s Mount Fuji is famous for its height and width but it’s also reachable by novice hikers without lots of time on their hands due to the nation’s efforts to make it accessible. Now, the researchers behind one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, Fugaku, which is another name for Mt. Fuji, are trying to make the supercomputer just as accessible on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. Read this post to learn more.

Dr. Kevin Leyton-Brown and Neil Newman are computer scientists at the University of British Columbia (UBC) working at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and microeconomic theory. Their research demands large-scale, high-performance computing, in episodic bursts, to run parallel simulations of complex auctions. When Leyton-Brown and Newman began research into the computationally complex auction theory behind the 2016 United States wireless spectrum auction, their ML models required significantly more computing power than their on-premises infrastructure could provide. The UBC team turned to RONIN, an AWS Partner, and the virtually unlimited infrastructure of the AWS Cloud, to accelerate their time to answers and new discoveries.

In the spring of 2019, environmental modelers at the Lake Michigan Air Directors Consortium (LADCO) had a new problem to solve. Emerging research on air pollution along the shores of the Great Lakes in the United States showed that to properly simulate the pollution episodes in the region we needed to apply our models at a finer spatial granularity than the computational capacity of our in-house HPC cluster could handle. The LADCO modelers turned to AWS ParallelCluster to access the HPC resources needed to do this modeling faster and scale for our member states.

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.