AWS Public Sector Blog

Tag: Amazon EC2

microscope in lab closeup

Structural biologists learning cryo-electron microscopy can access educational resources powered by AWS

Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) — the technology that won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry — lets scientists peer into the molecular “machines” at work in our cells in ways that were previously impossible. Using advanced microscopes, cryo-EM captures images of proteins flash-frozen in vitreous ice, revealing their 3D structure in near-native states. Even as access to this technology improves, many researchers are still limited by computing bottlenecks. The cryo-EM field needs to provide more hands-on training in how to process such large datasets. Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows us to provide training, broadening the impact of this important structural biology technology.

Dr. Nick Engerer, CTO of Solcast, standing next to solar panels

Solcast: Solar irradiance forecasting for the solar powered future

Solcast produces real-time, historical and forecast estimates of the available solar radiation resources around the globe. Altogether, this requires processing imagery from five geostationary weather satellites, which take snapshots of the Earth from space every 5-15 minutes. These images can be as fine as 1 kilometer in spatial resolution and are re-captured and transmitted as frequently as every five minutes – a large volume of data. A single third-generation weather satellite in orbit over the United States such as the GOES-16 generates nearly two terabytes (TB) of data each month.

Languages

Oxford University Press makes high-quality language data available using AWS

Oxford University Press (OUP) is a department of the University of Oxford and the largest university press in the world. In 2015, OUP launched the Oxford Global Languages (OGL) initiative aiming to build lexical resources for 100 of the world’s languages and make them freely available online. OUP knew that on-premises solutions wouldn’t provide the scalability and flexibility required for developing an MVP and expanding it in case of success. OUP chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) because it matched the requirements around scalability and flexibility, provided managed services for storing and accessing data securely, and offered options for deployment and automation.

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Tracking global antimicrobial resistance among pathogens using Nextflow and AWS

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.

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The sum is worth more than the parts: The unintended benefits of moving Microsoft workloads to AWS

Education, nonprofit, and government customers often find themselves moving Microsoft workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cost savings, but then also reaped performance improvements. AWS can seamlessly support thousands of applications, systems, and solutions – including Microsoft workloads – without disrupting service during migration. Read stories of how AWS global customers used AWS for Microsoft workloads.

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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.

Hot education startups logos

Back to school 2019 hot AWS EdStart startups: School administration technology edition

AWS EdStart members are pushing the limits in education by creating products and solutions to improve school administration. In honor of back to school season, we are featuring companies who are using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build solutions that help educational institutions improve operations. Read on to learn about these AWS EdStart EdTechs.

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances are now available in Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud (US) Regions. AWS GovCloud (US) is Amazon’s isolated cloud infrastructure and services designed to address specific regulatory and compliance requirements of US Government agencies, as well as contractors, educational institutions, and other US customers that run sensitive workloads in the cloud. With Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, AWS GovCloud (US) customers can take advantage of the largest pool of cost-effective compute capacity in the world, while realizing savings up to 90% compared to on-demand prices. Spot Instances provide acceleration, scale, and cost savings that are ideal for fault-tolerant, flexible, loosely coupled, and stateless workloads.

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.