Tag: Amazon EC2

Computational biology is undergoing a revolution. However, the analysis of single cells is a hard problem to solve. Standard statistical techniques used in genomic analysis fail to capture the complexity present in single-cell datasets. Open Problems in Single-Cell Analysis is a community-driven effort using AWS to drive the development of novel methods that leverage the power of single-cell data.

This is a guest post by Maria Teleńczuk, research engineer at the Paris-Saclay Center for Data Science (CDS), and Alexandre Gramfort, senior research scientist at INRIA, the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology. Maria and Alexandre explain how they adapted their open source data challenge platform RAMP to train the models submitted by student challenge participants using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot instances, and how they leveraged AWS to support three student challenges.

OCEARCH is a data-centric organization built to help scientists collect previously unattainable data about the ocean. Their mission is to accelerate the ocean’s return to balance and abundance, through innovation in scientific research, education, outreach, and policy, using unique collaborations of individuals and organizations in the US and abroad. As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), we invited Fernanda Ubatuba, president and COO at OCEARCH, to share how her organization is making strides in helping ocean conservation and how AWS is supporting her mission.

The Urban Analytics Lab at the National University of Singapore (NUS) spearheads research in geospatial data analysis and 3D city modelling. The lab’s work underpins the development of smart cities and provides scientists, architects, urban planners, and real estate developers with data insights. These insights help parties make informed decisions about projects ranging from energy modelling to urban farming. To meet rising global demand for its data analytics and planning tools, Urban Analytics Lab turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

One of the biggest scientific achievements of the twenty-first century was the completion of the Human Genome Project and the publication of a draft human genome. The project took over 13 years to complete and remains one of the largest private-public international collaborations ever. Advances since in sequencing technologies, computational hardware, and novel algorithms reduced the time it takes to produce a human genome assembly to only a few days, at a fraction of the cost. This made using the human genome draft for precision and personalized medicine more achievable. In this blog, we demonstrate how to do a genome assembly in the cloud in a cost-efficient manner using ARM-based AWS Graviton2 instances.

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.

RONIN is an AWS Partner solution that empowers researchers with a simple interface to create and control computing resources, set and monitor budgets, and forecast spend. RONIN is designed and architected to advance research institutions’ missions, by providing a research platform that manages the most common research use cases, and is also compatible with advanced cloud computing services from AWS. Learn what powers RONIN underneath the user-friendly interface.

C40 is a network of the world’s megacities committed to addressing climate change. C40 empowers cities to collaborate effectively, share knowledge, and drive meaningful, measurable, and sustainable action on climate change. C40 delivers insights to help city governments understand how to deliver emission reductions and climate resilience. C40’s primary platform for sharing this knowledge is the C40 Knowledge Hub, launched in 2019, to provide all participating cities with the knowledge and tools necessary to drive large-scale climate action. The Knowledge Hub is an online platform bringing together insights, practical experiences, and tested approaches from leading cities, for cities at every stage of their climate commitments.

AWS Partner ITZ Data, with support from UNICEF and the Canadian Embassy in Guatemala, helped Ministerio de Educación de Guatemala launch Mineduc Digital—the country’s first online platform where students can access digital self-study guides from any device connected to the internet. The Ministry implemented the solution in less than two months, paving the way for the digital transformation of their education system. The solution was built on AWS.

Applications running on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack are ubiquitous—WordPress alone represents 38% of all content management systems. Because of the popularity of these applications, public sector organisations such as educational institutions should protect their business continuity by implementing disaster recovery (DR) solutions: policies, tools, and procedures to help the recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure and systems following a disaster. AWS Professional Services created a business continuity solution for on-premises LAMP applications that could eliminate the need for physical backup infrastructure and improve recovery time. The solution was recently piloted by Cardiff University.