AWS HPC Blog

In this blog post, we cover how to run GROMACS – a popular open source designed for simulations of proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids – cost effectively by leveraging EC2 Spot Instances within AWS ParallelCluster. We also show how to checkpoint GROMACS to recover gracefully from possible Spot Instance interruptions.

Today we’re excited to announce the availability of a new public Spack Binary Cache. In a collaboration, between AWS, E4S, Kitware, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Spack users now have access to a public build cache hosted on Amazon S3. The use of this Binary Cache will result in up to 20x faster install times for common Spack packages.

This post covers the different ways you can encode a dependency between basic and array jobs in AWS Batch. We also cover why you may want to encode dependencies outside of Batch altogether using a workflow system like AWS Step Functions or Apache Airflow.

In this post, I cover some of the recent updates to AWS Batch, including improvements to job placement, addition of AWS PrivateLink support, and the new capabilities to update your AWS Batch compute environments.

Somatic variants are genetic alterations which are not inherited but acquired during one’s lifespan, for example those that are present in cancer tumors. In this post, we will demonstrate how to perform somatic variant calling from matched tumor and normal genome sequence data, as well as tumor-only whole genome and whole exome datasets using an NVIDIA GPU-accelerated Parabricks pipeline, and compare the results with baseline CPU-based workflows.

Drug discovery is an expensive proposition, with a $2.6 billion cost over 10 years and just a 12% success rate. AI promises to significantly improve the success rate by finding small molecule hits for undruggable targets. On the forefront of using AI in drug discovery is Atomwise, with its AtomNet® platform. In this blog, we will lay out the challenges of the drug discovery process, and show how AI/ML startups are solving these challenges using solutions from Atomwise, AWS, and WEKA.

Organizations such as Amazon Prime Air and Joby Aviation use Simcenter STAR-CCM+ for running CFD simulations on AWS so they can reduce product manufacturing cycles and achieve faster times to market. In this post today, we describe the performance and price analysis of running Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations using Siemens SimcenterTM STAR-CCM+TM software on AWS HPC clusters.

Matt Rasmussen, VP of Software Engineering at insitro, expands on his first post on redun, insitro’s data science tool for bioinformatics, to describe how redun makes use of advanced AWS features. Specifically, Matt describes how AWS Batch’s Array Jobs is used to support workflows with large fan-out, and how AWS Glue’s DynamicFrame is used to run computationally heterogenous workflows with different back-end needs such as Spark, all in the same workflow definition.

Matt Rasmussen, VP of Software Engineering at insitro describes their recently released, open-source data science framework, redun, which allows data scientists to define complex scientific workflows that scale from their laptop to large-scale distributed runs on serverless platforms like AWS Batch and AWS Glue. I this post, Matt shows how redun lends itself to Bioinformatics workflows which typically involve wrapping Unix-based programs that require file staging to and from object storage. In the next blog post, Matt describes how redun scales to large and heterogenous workflows by leveraging AWS Batch features such as Array Jobs and AWS Glue features such as Glue DynamicFrame.

Quantum physics and high-performance computing have slashed research times for a consortium of researchers led by Qubit Pharmaceuticals. This post describes the discovery of chemical substances that may lead to new COVID-19 treatments in only six months using cloud technology.