AWS Summit Kicks Off in New York, Features Best of Show Winner

July 10, 2014 | The Amazon Web Services Cloud Summit kicked off this morning with a keynote from Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer. In order to achieve agility, Vogels said, one must experiment continuously, measure relentlessly, and learn from the findings. To facilitate that, Vogels announced CloudWatch Logs to monitor the system and application logs for trends and events over time, and made several announcements in the mobile space including Amazon Cognito, an identity management and synchronization service, and Amazon Mobile analytics & SDK.

Vogels also invited AWS customers including Air BNB, Conde Nast, and others on stage to discuss how they use the Cloud to mobilize their business. Representing pharma and the life sciences, Steve Litster, Global Lead for High Performance and Scientific Computing at Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, talking about how NIBR used the Cloud to conduct 39 years of computing in just under 9 hours.

NIBR had a 10 million compound docking project that would have required 50,000 compute cores, Litster said. But with the help of CycleSever for workload placement (a 2014 Bio-IT World Best of Show winner), CycleCloud to orchestrate HPC environments across AWS, with the Chef 11 Server for continuous instance configuration, and HTCondor for job scheduling, NIBR was able to design a solution that Litster called "truly a work of art." Instead of taking 39 years, NIBR spun up instances in about 2 hours, ran the docking simulations for 9 hours, and and for about $4,200 identified three promising compounds. More details on the NIBR project at the Cycle Computing blog.