Category: Research

How do we avoid the next global pandemic? For researchers collaborating with the University of British Columbia Cloud Innovation Center (UBC CIC), the answer to that question lies in a massive library of genetic sequencing data. But there is a problem: the data library is so massive that traditional computing can’t comprehensively analyze or process it. So the UBC CIC team collaborated with computational virologists to create Serratus, an open-science viral discovery platform to transform the field of genomics—built on the massive computational power of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.

The AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program makes high-value, cloud-optimized datasets publicly available on AWS. We work with data providers to democratize access to data by making it available to the public for analysis on AWS; to develop new cloud-native techniques, formats, and tools that lower the cost of working with data; and to encourage the development of communities that benefit from access to shared datasets. This quarter, we released 19 new or updated datasets like validated OpenStreetMap data, bioacoustic data, COVID-19 detection data, and more.

It takes a medical village to discover and diagnose rare diseases. The National Institutes of Health’s Undiagnosed Diseases Network (UDN) is made up of a coordinating center, 12 clinical sites, a model organism screening center, a metabolomics core, a sequencing core, and a biorepository. For many years prior to the UDN, the experts at these sites were limited by antiquated data-sharing procedures. The UDN leadership realized that if they wanted to scale up and serve as many patients as possible, they needed to transform how they process, store, and share medical data—which led the UDN to the AWS Cloud.

Galaxy is a scientific workflow, data integration, and digital preservation platform that aims to make computational biology accessible to research scientists that do not have computer programming or systems administration experience. Although it was initially developed for genomics research, it is largely domain agnostic and is now used as a general bioinformatics workflow management system, running on everything from academic mainframes to personal computers. But researchers and organizations may worry about capacity and the accessibility of compute power for those with limited or restrictive budgets. In this blog post, we explain how to implement Galaxy on the cloud at a predictable cost within your research or grant budget with Amazon Lightsail.

At the 10th anniversary of re:Invent, Max Peterson, vice president of worldwide public sector at Amazon Web Services (AWS) took to the stage to highlight AWS customers’ innovative advancements to empower communities and transform the future of research, as well as new cloud-powered paths to space exploration and the impact this has on our lives here on Earth. He was joined by customers who shared their stories of how they’re leveraging the cloud to drive their missions. Plus, Max announced a series of new initiatives for public sector customers.

This year’s cohort of nonprofit winners of the Imagine Grant represents the biggest group of winners out of a record number of applications, each exhibiting a commitment to innovation and an insistence on the highest standards for the mission areas they serve. For the first time, this year’s Imagine Grant offered two distinct award categories, inviting nonprofits of all sizes to put forward both advanced technical projects in the Go Further, Faster award category and foundational IT projects in the Momentum to Modernize award category.

According to a new IDC report, the cloud is helping researchers conduct research faster than ever before by reducing data analysis and processing times, and is allowing researchers around the world to collaborate on solving universal problems. In addition to the positive impact on research, IDC also forecasts that continued adoption of cloud computing globally could prevent environmental emission of more than 1 billion metric tons of CO2 from 2021 through 2024, almost equivalent to removing the 2020 CO2 emissions of Germany and the U.K. combined.

The higher education we knew before the pandemic will not be the one that emerges post-pandemic. Leaders must meet this moment by redefining the constructs of higher education. The “Top 10 IT Issues, 2022: The Higher Education We Deserve” report released by EDUCAUSE groups the top 10 priorities into three imperatives: 1) shared vision, shared strategy; 2) student success as institutional success; and 3) sustainable business models.

Across Canada, hospitals, care providers, academic health sciences centers, and more are using accessible, scalable technology to support their staff and provide faster, better access to citizens in need of care. With Amazon Alexa, patients only need their voice to answer a few questions and get started towards healing.

Terabytes of Earth Observation (EO) data are collected each day, quickly leading to petabyte-scale datasets. By bringing these datasets to the cloud, users can use the compute and analytics resources of the cloud to reliably scale with growing needs. In this post, we show you how to set up a Pangeo solution with Kubernetes, Dask, and Jupyter notebooks step-by-step on Amazon Web Services (AWS), to automatically scale cloud compute resources and parallelize workloads across multiple Dask worker nodes.