AWS Public Sector Blog

Category: Research

The Institute of Human Virology Nigeria reduced costs by 64% by migrating hundreds of mailboxes to Amazon WorkMail

The Institute of Human Virology Nigeria (IHVN) uses email as their main communication method, with over 800 email accounts using up to 50GB of storage space each. IHVN used AWS to migrate their email to Amazon WorkMail to reduce the cost of each mailbox by 64 percent, allowing their IT team to easily manage the corporate email infrastructure and get enterprise grade security.

How open data from weather radar helps scientists improve environmental understanding

Weather radars see more than just the weather: they see smoke from fires, meteors, birds, mayflies, and almost anything else in the atmosphere. This makes weather radars an invaluable tool for scientists seeking to further the understanding of atmospheric processes and anything else that happens to be flying through the radar’s field of view. The Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) seeks to accelerate sustainability-related innovation and research by helping to minimizing the cost and time required to store, acquire, and analyze large weather and climate datasets.

How to put a supercomputer in the hands of every scientist

The AWS Cloud gives you access to virtually unlimited infrastructure suitable for high performance computing (HPC) workloads. With HPC, you can remove long queues and waiting times so you don’t have to choose availability over performance. In this technical guide, learn how to use AWS ParallelCluster to set up and manage an HPC cluster in a flexible, elastic, and repeatable way.

Data egress waiver available for eligible researchers and institutions

The Global Data Egress Waiver (GDEW) program helps eligible researchers and academic institutions use AWS cloud storage, computing, and database services by waiving data egress fees. GDEW can be a valuable tool that gives eligible researchers and institutions a more predictable budget, which in turns allows them to have more direct access to the cloud than they might otherwise. Find out if your team is eligible to take advantage of the data egress waiver program.

How the cloud is helping us better understand and manage the oceans

The world’s waters are largely unknown, with vast areas still unmapped. To protect and preserve the oceans, we need to extensively understand its systems, and data is at the core of that process. The Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) is committed to enabling better access to the foundational data that can help researchers, businesses, and policy-makers better monitor and manage the ocean’s valuable resources.

Driving innovation in single-cell analysis on AWS

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.

close up of laptop showing tracking of sharks via OCEARCH along the US Carolina coastline

Assessing the ocean’s health by monitoring shark populations

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.

aerial street map Singapore

NUS Urban Analytics Lab scales research globally with AWS

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).

Using big data to help governments make better policy decisions

In Europe, government agencies and policy makers see the value in using new technology to unlock digital transformation and deliver better, more innovative citizen services. Using data for statistics initiatives, including open data, can help researchers produce innovative products and tools, including visualisation, to inform government officials ahead of making policy decisions that impact their citizens. When it comes to big data, policy makers need to collaborate with researchers to address issues and challenges in using these new data sources. To work toward this goal, Eurostat, the statistical office of the EU, hosted its bi-annual European Big Data Hackathon.

human genome

Accelerating genome assembly with AWS Graviton2

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.