We’ve been heads down, hard at work tackling challenges in Earth Science and Disaster Response and are ready to share what we’re doing with all of you. June 11-12, we’ll be joining AWS at their Public Sector Summit in Washington, DC to talk about some of these challenges and how we’re working to solve them.
Dan Pilone on AWS SBE & Disaster Response
The Snowball Edge (SBE) offered by AWS provides new ways for us to think about how we deliver–physically–technology to help save lives. Dan and AWS’s Joe Flasher talk about how we’re using the SBE to get mapping technology to provide disaster relief in areas with no network connectivity.
When? Tuesday, Jun 11, 1:45 PM – 02:35 PM
Where? Room 103AB
Volunteers and emergency personnel carefully coordinate their response to natural disasters. This coordination requires data and making data actionable and accessible at the tactical edge remains a challenge. We’ll dive into the results of our disaster response user needs study and invite Element 84 on stage to exhibit their prototype disaster response pipeline for field data management. The serverless, cloud-based pipeline combines public and private data sources with open source software. It can provide the field with a ruggedized remote data center (SBE), preloaded with critical information, including reach-back capabilities. You’ll see how this works firsthand and learn ways first responders can update data from in-situ sources such as drones.
How we wrangle data from space.
Other talks from teams we’re working with
Amanda Tan on Earth Science Data Processing with Pangeo
Dealing with petabytes of data proves challenging in any pipeline architecture. Join Amanda Tan from UW talking along Joe Flasher from AWS And Annie Burgess from ESIP about how they’re using Pangeo and machine learning to analyze CubeSat data. Element 84 is a co-PI on a NASA ACCESS grant with Amanda, and is also an ESIP partner.
When? Tuesday, Jun 11, 4:00 PM – 04:50 PM
Where? Room 202A
The Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) is a nonprofit member organization supported by NASA, NOAA, and USGS, with a belief that the quality of life, economic opportunities, and stewardship of the planet are enhanced by regular use of timely, scientifically sound Earth science data. Many agencies, academic institutions, and scientists rarely have the resources and expertise to explore computationally intensive Earth science research in the cloud. Still, the opportunity is within reach. Through small grant funding, AWS Cloud research credits, and community input, ESIP’s lab supports projects aimed at adopting community-accepted best practices in scientific data management and analysis. In this session we highlight several lab projects, including how one team is leveraging the Pangeo project on AWS to build an open-source pipeline to infer snow cover at meter-scale resolution from CubeSat data, using machine learning.
Learn about how we’re enhancing Pangeo with NASA EOS.
Joseph Foster on Reliable Networking Patterns at NASA with AWS
Security and performance are 2 major aspects of providing reliable infrastructure when working with data. NASA’s Joseph Foster talks along with Kyle Hart from AWS about the challenges they faced and how they solved them. Element 84 is working with Joe to build out NASA’s cloud capabilities for this mission and others.
When? Tuesday, Jun 11, 2:45 PM – 03:35 PM
Where? East Salon B
Learn common networking patterns for connecting to AWS resources securely and reliably using AWS networking innovations. Start with the basics, including AWS Direct Connect (DX) and Amazon VPN, examine the capabilities of AWS Transit Gateway and DX Gateway, demystify public/private and hosted virtual interfaces, and look at patterns for interconnecting virtual private cloud with Transit Gateway. Explore performance considerations and encrypted private tunnels with Amazon Virtual Private Network (VPN) and the new client VPN service. Also hear how NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center is connecting to AWS to accelerate cutting-edge Earth and space breakthroughs using the cloud.
Rich Signell on Earth Science Data Analysis in the Cloud with Pangeo
Part of the beauty of the cloud is being able to provide scientists a way to work in a browser from anywhere with internet access. Rich from USGS talks along side Kevin Jorissen from AWS about how they’re using Pangeo to provide better tooling to our best and brightest.
When? Wednesday, Jun 12, 10:00 AM – 10:50 AM
Where? Ballroom Stage B – Silent Disco
The Pangeo project is building a flexible, open framework for scientific analysis and visualization based on tools widely used in the python ecosystem. We will demonstrate the flexibility of the system, showing how the user needs only their browser to access the framework via JupyterHub. Data is stored in cloud-friendly formats on Amazon S3, while Xarray provides tools for efficient data manipulation, Dask schedules fine-grained parallelization on a Kubernetes cluster, and PyViz provides interactive visualization. We also discuss performance, security, transferability across public cloud platforms, costs to operate, and approaches to encourage a cultural shift in scientific computation.
See more about how we’re working with Disaster Response Pipelines.
E84 on AWS
We’re constantly working on new challenges in the cloud, find out more about what we’re doing.