AWS & Intel Research Webinar Series


Fast scaling research workloads on the cloud



About the On-Demand Series


In this webinar series, Amazon Web Services (AWS) research experts and some of our customers will cover how AWS can help you accelerate your time to science. Hear from CSIRO, Bureau of Meteorology, Australia, and Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of Sydney.

Learn how to manage your data pipelines and store petabytes of data effectively with technologies like high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and quantum computing.


In partnership with:

AWSxIntel






Who should watch this series?


Research audience with an interest in the specific workloads and working in the various verticals where the workloads are used for enabling research. The roles include researcher, research scientist, principal research investigators, professors, director of research, supercomputing manager, dean, HPC admins, and computing center head.



Featured Topics


Session Overview: Join this session for an introduction to AI/ML on AWS and Intel, and see how we support research AI/ML workloads with compute based optimization. We will look at case studies and typical workflows for training and inference. We will share how the key AWS AI services are powered by 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors with VNNI, DL Boost features. Attendees will also hear more about Amazon SageMaker and see a case study from a research customer, in addition to a demo.

Speaker: 

  • Spencer Marley, Head of Business Development for AI/ML, Asia Pacific and Japan, Public Sector, AWS


Session Overview: In this session, get an introduction to quantum computing and how industries and academic institutions are exploring using it to solve problems that are beyond the reach of classical computers. Check out a brief overview of Amazon Braket, a fully managed service from AWS that helps researchers to get started with quantum computing, including a walk-through of the AWS Management Console, the Amazon Braket SDK, and the multiple back-ends provided by AWS.

Speaker: 

  • Dr. Sanjay Padhi, Head of AWS Research, US Education, AWS


Session Overview: Join this introductory session to learn how AWS and Intel are used by healthcare institutions and partners to support and enable care delivery and the intersection for researchers.

Speakers: 

  • Dr. Julian Sham, Head of Health Business, Asia Pacific and Japan, AWS
  • Patrick C Brennan (Ph.D), Chair, Medical Imaging, Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of Sydney


Session Overview: Join this session for an overview of genomics on AWS powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, including solutions and customer examples for processing, analysis, and interpretation to accelerate scientific discoveries and enable precision medicine.

Speakers: 

  • Lisa McFerrin, Bioinformatician, AWS
  • Dr. Denis Bauer, Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO, Australia


Session Overview: Join this session to overview how molecular dynamics research workflows with its associated applications (e.g., NAMD, GROMANCS) and tools (e.g., VMD) have adapted to use the cloud. Researchers can now remotely run simulation workloads at scale without any investment in local computing resources and reduce time and effort spent setting up complex HPC environments. See how software optimization and code modernization helps revolutionize HPC for research.

Speakers: 

  • Austin Cherian, Technical Lead, High Performance Computing, Asia Pacific and Japan, Public Sector, AWS
  • Debamitra Chakravorty (Ph.D.), Project Lead – Computational Biology, Novel Techsciences (OPC) Private Limited, India


Session Overview: This session will focus on how you can run CFD applications on AWS powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and how this can make a difference to its increase use in academia and industry. Go through the services that underpin this like Amazon EC2, Amazon S3 and FSx for Lustre. We will also have a live demo of running OpenFOAM and STAR-CCM+ on AWS.

Speaker: 

  • Dr. Neil Ashton, Principal Computational Fluid Dynamics Specialist Solution Architect, AWS




Session Overview: In this session, learn about recent HPC results in large-scale numerical weather prediction and the AWS Earth on AWS public dataset repository with its NOAA and NASA datasets and sustainability initiatives. We will discover community initiatives promising democratization of earth science resources, including Pangeo. Also, experience how the weather research and forecasting achieve best performance and scalability on AWS and Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and software tools.

Speakers: 

  • Kevin Jorissen (Ph.D), Specialist Solutions Architect, High Performance Computing (HPC) and Numerical Weather Prediction, AWS
  • Justin Freeman, Senior Research Scientist, Bureau of Meteorology, Australian Government






Featured Speakers


Spencer Marley, Head of Business Development for AI/ML, Asia Pacific and Japan, Public Sector, AWS

Spencer is the Head of Business Development for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) for the Public Sector in Asia Pacific Japan.

He helps our customers use AWS AI/ML services and infrastructure to solve some of the challenges that their organizations face. Spencer has been with AWS for over 3 years and loves all things data related. In his previous role he was program managing the AI/ML team for the Commercial Sector in Asia Pacific, with a particular focus on the Amazon SageMaker group of services. Prior to this, he was the subject matter expert in Asia Pacific for helping customers achieve cost savings on their AWS bill with cloud financial management best practices.

Prior to joining AWS, Spencer worked for over 10 years in consulting with KPMG, in both London and Singapore. He specialized in financial modelling and data analytics, helping KPMG’s customers to design, build and deploy bespoke solutions to solve business problems.

Spencer is a CFA Charterholder and a former Chartered Accountant. He holds a Masters degree in Mathematics, specializing in Statistics, and 5 AWS Certifications.



Dr. Sanjay Padhi, Head of AWS Research, US Education, AWS

Dr. Sanjay Padhi leads AWS Research Initiatives including various federal research programs such as AI/ML, Big Data and Quantum Computing in collaboration with the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and other government agencies.

He has more than 15 years of experience in large-scale Distributed Computing, Data Analytics and Machine Learning, and is the co-creator of workload management systems, currently used for all the data processing and simulation activities by the CMS collaboration, one of the largest experiments in the world at CERN, consisting of more than 180 institutions across 40 countries. He also co-founded the Computing Grid project at Deutsches Elektronen- Synchrotron (DESY), Germany before joining CERN.

Dr. Padhi obtained his Ph.D. from McGill University in High Energy Physics and is also currently appointed by the Dean of Faculty as an Adjunct Associate Professor of Physics at Brown University.



Dr. Julian Sham, Head of Health Business, Asia Pacific and Japan, AWS

Dr. Julian Sham is the Head of Health Business for Asia Pacific & Japan at Amazon Web Services. He brings more than 30 years of experience in healthcare to these roles, including more than 10 years as a practicing hospital doctor.

He is passionate about how healthcare delivery can be augmented through Cloud and Health technology, improving clinical engagement and stakeholder understanding to accelerate clinical solution design life cycles.

For the past 20 years, he has focused on healthcare technology and change management, managing healthcare projects involving IT implementations and clinical transformation across Europe, the United States, China, Australia, South East Asia and Singapore for both public sector and private organizations. He serves as a member of the Executive Committee for Health Level Seven International (HL7)(Singapore).



Patrick C Brennan (Ph.D.), Chair, Medical Imaging, Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of Sydney

Patrick C Brennan (Ph.D.) is a global leader of medical imaging optimization and perception and Co-Director of the international BREAST platform. He is Chair of Diagnostic Imaging. He is the world’s highest ranked researcher in Medical Radiation Sciences.

His work has changed clinical practice, impacted upon national guidelines and informed international reports. He was awarded the University of Sydney Payne-Scott Professorial Distinction in 2018. Brennan has published over 460 publications in the highest ranked radiologic journals and a textbook. He has won 20 awards and prizes for his research outputs.



Lisa McFerrin, Bioinformatician, AWS

Lisa is a bioinformaticist at AWS, where she leads initiatives supporting the genomics industry as part of worldwide business development.

Prior to AWS, Lisa worked at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center where she specialized in the development of software and methods that bridge genomic and clinical data to advance the understanding of cancer biology and improve patient care. In these roles, she facilitates collaborative and reproducible research in order to lower the barriers in communication, analysis, and sharing of data, knowledge and methods. Lisa has a background in math and computer science and obtained her Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from North Carolina State University.



Dr. Denis Bauer, Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO, Australia

Dr. Denis Bauer is CSIRO’s Principal Research Scientist in transformational bioinformatics and an internationally recognised expert in machine learning and cloud-based genomics.

She is an adjunct associate professor at Macquarie University and keynoted the International Bioinformatics Conference Jakarta ‘19, AWS Summit 2019, Open Data Science India ‘18.

Her achievements include developing open-source machine-learning bioinformatics software used by 10,000 researchers annually and contributing to Australia’s COVID-19 response.



Austin Cherian, Technical Lead, High Performance Computing, Asia Pacific and Japan, Public Sector, AWS

Austin is currently the Technical Lead, Asia Pacific & Japan for High Performance Computing practice at Amazon Web Services. Austin is responsible for supporting various technical and business teams to help customers with a path to High Performance Computing on AWS cloud.

Prior to AWS, Austin was with Intel in various roles, the last one being the Head of Intel’s HPC & AI business for India where he helped customers with a path to High Performance Computing on Intel architectures across a diverse set of workloads including Molecular Dynamics, Chemistry, Computation Fluid Dynamics and Distributed Deep Learning to name a few. While at Intel Austin was also part of Intel’s global High Performance Computing Applications engineering team responsible for optimization of scientific computing application codes where his experience has been mainly on optimizing Molecular Dynamics and computational fluid dynamics codes.

Austin also possesses various AWS certifications including the AWS Associate as well as AWS Cloud practitioner certifications.



Debamitra Chakravorty (Ph.D.), Project Lead – Computational Biology, Novel Techsciences (OPC) Private Limited, India

Debamitra is a highly skilled bioinformatician with 10+ years of experience in proteomics, drug design, molecular dynamics simulation analysis, bio-statistical analysis, algorithm development, artificial intelligence, and other areas related to Proteomics-Bioinformatics.

She has completed her Ph.D. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India, and has three years of post-doctoral experience from Bose Institute, Kolkata, India. To date, she has published 11 peer-reviewed papers and 3 book chapters.



Dr. Neil Ashton, Principal Computational Fluid Dynamics Specialist Solution Architect, AWS

Dr. Neil Ashton is a Principal CFD Specialist Solution Architect at Amazon Web Services and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford.

Previous positions were at NASA Ames Research Centre, Renault/Lotus Formula 1 Team as well as consultancy roles for Formula 1, Audi, British Cycling, Williams Advanced Engineering and others. His expertise is on applying and developing the next generation of Computational Fluid Dynamics approaches with a particular focus on interplay between high-fidelity turbulence models and High- Performance Computing (HPC).

He has authored over 30 papers in leading international journals and conferences and has had leadership roles including chair and lead organiser for the ICCFD10 conference, 1st automotive CFD Prediction Workshop and also been a reviewer for the EU commission as well as a number of leading academic journals. At AWS he drives the global strategy for CFD to ensure that AWS is to best place for customers to run their CFD simulations.



Kevin Jorissen (Ph.D.), Specialist Solutions Architect, High Performance Computing (HPC) and Numerical Weather Prediction, AWS

Kevin has 15 years of experience in computational science, and holds a Ph.D. in Physics. He developed codes solving the quantum physics equations for light absorption by materials (WIEN2k, FEFF), and wrote about High Performance Computing (HPC) in the cloud before it was fashionable.

He worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Antwerp, Lausanne, Seattle, and Zurich. Kevin joined Amazon in 2015 to help accelerate the adoption of cloud computing in the scientific community globally. He works with meteorological institutes, national labs, startups, and enterprises to bring weather and climate operations and research to the cloud.

When he’s not using a few thousand cores for a forecast, teaching workshops, or talking to scientists, he might be out on a trail in the Cascades.



Justin Freeman, Senior Research Scientist, Bureau of Meteorology, Bureau of Meteorology, Australian Government

Justin has over 20 years of experience working in High Performance Computing and numerical modelling of Earth systems. He is a Senior Research Scientist at the Bureau of Meteorology where he leads a team of computational scientists. He develops environmental prediction systems which deliver new and improved products and services to the Australian community.






Download Slides & Recordings