Category: Research

The First Street Foundation is dedicated to communicating the flood and inundation risks posed by a changing environment, with an emphasis on allowing Americans to discover and understand those risks. By building awareness, our hope is that every individual is empowered to take steps to reduce their risk exposure to flooding, as well as that of their communities—today and in the future. First Street created a nationwide assessment of flood risk for the CONUS and DC, and is now sharing that assessment through Flood Factor™.

In 2014, the Wall Lab at Stanford University sought to answer one of the most pressing questions in neuroscience: What genes influence autism spectrum disorder (ASD)? According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), this neurodevelopmental disorder affects roughly one in 54 children in America and is on the rise—nearly tripling since 1992. In the lab’s study of ASD genetics, they chose the cloud—and a unique experimental approach—to speed the time to science.

Forest wildfire risk is increasing in the western United States. In the past five decades, large wildfire frequency and the area destroyed have risen by more than four and six times, respectively. The increased risk posed by wildfires has prompted scientists to try to assess wildfire risk to help inform whether to move people to safety before disastrous wildfires occur.

If you are a scientific researcher, you are likely more interested in getting your research done than in the computational resources that you use to do it. You may think about ways to continue your research remotely with the rise in remote work. Did you know the cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS) can accelerate your research and time to science? Here are five ways.

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.

To help researchers learn about cloud computing, AWS curated a list of no-cost, on-demand online courses tailored to researchers’ needs. With the cloud, scientists can quickly analyze massive data pipelines, store petabytes of data, and share their results with collaborators around the world. These online courses are available at any time to help users learn new cloud skills and services.

The rapidly changing and dynamic global health situation has impacted the lives of many people including researchers at universities and institutions worldwide. Many academic institutions are migrating to remote operations. Researchers are processing data, collaborating online, and trying to maintain labs remotely. Amazon and AWS are responding to these events in support of our communities and deploying resources and technology to enable remote learning and home working.

Researchers at the IceCube Experiment and University of California, San Diego just completed the largest cloud simulation in history using 51,500 cloud GPUs including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) On-Demand and Spot Instances to understand messages from the universe. The IceCube experiment searches for ghost-like massless particles called neutrinos deep within the ice at the South Pole using a unique buried cubic kilometer-size telescope consisting of 5,160 optical sensors.

Cromwell is a workflow management system from Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based research institute that leverages the power of genomics to help us understand biology as well as treat human disease. Cromwell aims to facilitate scientific workflows for genome analysis. It enables genomic researchers, scientists, developers, and analysts to efficiently run their experiments, without deep expertise in computing capabilities. And it’s now on AWS.