Govplace helps NIH Office of Portfolio Analysis scale on demand and reduce research costs on AWS

As the primary agency of the US government responsible for biomedical and public health research, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is one of the leading medical research centers in the world. NIH’s 27 institutes and centers conduct scientific research on topics including cancer detection and prevention, reducing health threats from climate change, and understanding the intricacies of the human brain.

The NIH Office of Portfolio Analysis (OPA)—part of the Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives within the Office of the NIH Director—is tasked with helping NIH prioritize its research. Every day, OPA analysts, data scientists, and software engineers provide methodological and analytical support for NIH leaders to evaluate and prioritize current and emerging areas of research that will advance NIH’s mission.

For several years, OPA struggled to scale its on-premises analysis application environment to keep pace with the demand from NIH. “For a lot of our analytics work, we need to quickly analyze research on demand,” says Chuck Lynch, Director of IT Resources and Security for the National Institutes of Health Office of Portfolio Analysis. “That means we need to stand up servers to do the data preprocessing and the analytics for a few weeks and then shut it down.”

Because of the constraints of a data center, OPA typically needed up to six months to acquire and set up new hardware to accommodate one-time analysis requests.

Helping scientists conduct global research with Govplace and AWS

In 2013, OPA migrated its application environment to Amazon Web Services (AWS), deploying applications in AWS GovCloud (US) to gain on-demand scalability. More recently, OPA wanted to find a better way to optimize its cloud costs as its analytical research demands continued to grow. “Moving to the cloud is only the first step. Once you’ve deployed to the cloud, you then have to manage how to get what you need within budgetary constraints,” says Lynch.

That need led OPA to work with AWS Partner Govplace, a systems integrator and solution provider for the public sector. OPA used AWS to build a suite of tools for indexing and searching large volumes of text-based data. The solution runs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for media file and content storage and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) gp3 volumes for provisioning performance independent of storage. The solution also relies on a MongoDB Atlas database, which Govplace helped OPA procure through AWS Marketplace.

With its new solution, OPA conducts preprocessing using natural language processing (NLP) to pull data from millions of grants, journal articles, and patents. The data then flows into a MongoDB Atlas document database. NIH scientists and program managers have access to their own accounts, with the ability to quickly search all global biomedical research. “There’s a great deal of complexity in the natural language processing that can help us glean information that NIH can use to make decisions about research investments,” says Lynch.

Govplace provided security for the new environment through AWS services including Amazon Inspector and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), providing public and private access while reducing the possibility of private data being exposed.

Scaling to meet 10 times the capacity

With Govplace and AWS, OPA can scale its analytical applications on demand to 10 times the capacity whenever needed, with the ability to be in production in three hours instead of the six months the process would typically take in the data center.

“Prior to working with Govplace and running on AWS, we couldn’t get capacity up and running as fast as we needed to. We could always borrow compute assets from other NIH organizations, but that could be more difficult and costly than standing up our own system,” Lynch says. “Now, when a senior NIH leader needs analysis in less than a week, we can more easily accommodate that request. Overall, we can help NIH get to analysis faster than before.”

Gaining access to critical technical resources and knowledge

By working with Govplace, OPA experiences benefits including architecture reviews, AWS billing and account management support services, 24/7 technical support, and access to technical subject matter experts.

“Govplace gives us access to cloud resources and knowledge we didn’t have internally,” Lynch says. “That’s critical because it’s simple to move to the cloud, but enabling functionality the correct way is sometimes more of a challenge.”

For example, OPA realized it wasn’t using its storage features correctly. “We communicated with Govplace, and they quickly brought in experts to help us identify the issue and understand how to improve,” says Lynch.

Finding ways to optimize costs

OPA also met its goal of optimizing its cloud spending by collaborating with Govplace, which implemented financial operations (FinOps) capabilities to help OPA generate cost savings to further innovation.

“We recently had to deploy a new version of MongoDB Atlas, and Govplace made it easy for us to do that on AWS Marketplace while ensuring the billing and monitoring was done appropriately without us going over our budget,” says Lynch. “Overall, Govplace has been a great partner to us in terms of helping us find ways to save money in the cloud. We anticipate future cost savings by centralizing our data systems and building a new analytics platform, and we look forward to continuing our relationship with Govplace and AWS.”

To learn more and get started, contact your AWS account team or the AWS Public Sector team.