Partner Success with AWS / General Public Services / United States
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The National Institutes of Health Works with Govplace to Accelerate Scientific Research and Analysis
Find out how Govplace helps the NIH Office of Portfolio Analysis quickly index and search text-based research data.
10x
the compute capacity supported by on-demand scaling
50%
faster scalability
1 month
reduction in processing time
Millions
of grants, journal articles, and patents scanned on demand
Overview
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Portfolio Analysis (OPA) sought a more scalable and flexible IT environment to support applications including a research web database and tools for indexing and searching text-based data. To meet these needs, the organization worked with AWS Partner Govplace to create a new text-based indexing and search solution on AWS. Now, OPA scales in hours instead of months to support 10 times the compute capacity, helping researchers accelerate scientific research by quickly scanning millions of grants, journal articles, and patents.
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Opportunity | Searching for Scalability and Flexibility
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is one of the world's leading medical research centers. Part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, NIH makes important discoveries that improve health and save lives. The NIH Office of Portfolio Analysis (OPA)—part of the Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives (DPCPSI) within the Office of the NIH Director (OD)—helps NIH prioritize current and emerging areas of research. “We provide the search capability, analytics, and other mechanisms for the NIH institutes to support better decision-making about how to invest billions of dollars in science every year,” says Chuck Lynch, Director of IT Resources and Security for the National Institutes of Health Office of Portfolio Analysis.
For many years, OPA relied on on-premises servers and systems to run critical applications such as a web database for researchers and tools for indexing and searching large volumes of text-based data. Increasingly, OPA needed a more scalable and flexible IT environment to support its applications. This was challenging because OPA often required too much time to acquire and configure new hardware to support new analysis requests. “In the government, it can be time-consuming and expensive to procure and deploy hardware within the constraints of an annual budget,” Lynch says. “We also didn’t have fast access to compute resources. When a senior leader at NIH needed analysis in a week, we often had difficulty accommodating that because it took up to six months to procure and install servers and get all the networking up and running.”
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NIH scientists and program managers can make potentially better and faster decisions about research investments with the Govplace solution because of the rapid scalability we have on AWS.”
Chuck Lynch
Director of IT Resources and Security, the National Institutes of Health Office of Portfolio Analysis
Solution | Collaborating with Govplace to Enable Text-Based Indexing and Search on AWS
OPA had moved its key applications to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2013 to meet its requirements for scalability and flexibility. As part of this migration, OPA initially deployed applications in AWS GovCloud (US). “AWS gave us elasticity and rapid scalability so we could dynamically respond to requests for data preprocessing and analytics,” says Lynch. OPA also realized it needed to find a technology company that could simplify cloud procurement and tasks while optimizing cloud costs. “AWS is a highly complex system. You need a good understanding of the process of deploying, managing, and invoicing,” says Lynch. “It was sometimes difficult to control costs, and it was challenging to understand what we had deployed.”
OPA addressed these challenges by engaging Govplace, an AWS Partner that provides systems integration and services for public sector organizations. “Govplace offered the necessary AWS services through a readily accessible federal contract mechanism at a competitive price,” Lynch says. Govplace serves as the prime contractor for OPA, overseeing AWS projects and delivering AWS billing and support services. Govplace also provides 24/7 technical support, architecture reviews, and subject matter experts to augment OPA’s existing cloud resources as necessary.
Working closely with Govplace, OPA used AWS to create and manage a suite of tools for indexing and searching large volumes of text-based data. The new environment runs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, with an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) for each instance of an OPA application stack. OPA uses Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) gp3 volumes to provision performance independent of storage space, and it uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store media files and secure content. OPA also uses Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) to store and deploy container images and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) as the orchestration engine behind the application stack.
Govplace configured the new OPA environment with services including Amazon Inspector and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to allow public and private access with no chance of leaking private data. “All NIH scientists and program managers can have accounts and use the solution to securely search for global biomedical research,” says Lynch.
Outcome | Flexibility, On-Demand Scalability, and Cost Optimization
Working with Govplace, OPA has the flexibility to access third-party cloud resources on AWS Marketplace, such as the MongoDB Atlas multicloud developer data platform. OPA uses MongoDB Atlas to streamline content processing in a data repository that is not tied to a specific VPC. “We rely heavily on MongoDB Atlas, and we originally used the open source version,” says Lynch. “When we needed the professional version, our flexible Govplace contract enabled us to get that version quickly and ensure that the billing and monitoring were correct so we could deploy it within our budget.”
OPA also has the on-demand scalability to quickly add resources when researchers need them for analysis. “With Govplace and AWS, we can quickly scale to 10 times the capacity whenever we want to,” Lynch says. “Additionally, we can do it in 3 hours instead of the six months it might have taken in the on-premises environment.” As a result, OPA researchers can conduct analysis faster, quickly scanning millions of grants, journal articles, and patents through the Govplace solution’s natural language processing capabilities. Data preprocessed through natural language queries is ingested into a MongoDB Atlas document database, which researchers access through their own individual accounts. Natural language processing simplifies much of the complex data contained in the database. “NIH scientists and program managers can make potentially better and faster decisions about research investments with the Govplace solution because of the rapid scalability we have on AWS,” says Lynch. In addition, OPA has reduced the time required to support niche processing needs. For instance, the organization can create and terminate additional Amazon EC2 resources on demand.
OPA expects to optimize its cloud spending by collaborating with Govplace. “Govplace has been very good at helping us find ways to control costs,” Lynch says. “In addition, they supply us with architectural and technical knowledge that we didn't initially have internally. They also help our developers and data scientists get access to AWS that we didn’t have before. Govplace is definitely a value-added partner, which has made the AWS experience better and easier for our team.”
About National Institutes of Health Office of Portfolio Analysis
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Portfolio Analysis (OPA) is part of the Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives (DPCPSI) within the Office of the NIH Director (OD). OPA impacts NIH-supported research by enabling NIH decision makers and research administrators to evaluate and prioritize current and emerging areas of research that will advance NIH’s mission.
About AWS Partner Govplace
Govplace is an AWS Partner based in Bethesda, Maryland. The company is a value-added reseller and systems integrator exclusively focused on providing the public sector with best-of-breed technologies, services, and solutions.
AWS Services Used
Amazon EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) offers the broadest and deepest compute platform, with over 750 instances and choice of the latest processor, storage, networking, operating system, and purchase model to help you best match the needs of your workload.
Amazon EKS
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a fully managed Kubernetes service that enables you to run Kubernetes seamlessly in both AWS Cloud and on-premises data centers.
Amazon ECR
Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) is a fully managed container registry offering high-performance hosting, so you can reliably deploy application images and artifacts anywhere.
Amazon EBS
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) is an easy-to-use, scalable, high-performance block-storage service designed for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
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