NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Amazon Web Services has become the second of the three major commercial cloud platforms to join a National Institutes of Health program designed to promote cloud computing use among biomedical researchers.
NIH said today that it has reached an agreement for AWS to participate in the STRIDES (Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability) initiative to help researchers at the federal agency and at the 2,500 academic institutions it supports take advantage of the Amazon cloud.
NIH launched STRIDES in July with the goal of accelerating biomedical advances by reducing economic and technological barriers to accessing and analyzing large biomedical datasets.
Google Cloud was the first industry partner for the STRIDES initiative. With AWS now on board, Microsoft's Azure is the only one of the big three US cloud providers not to have an agreement with this NIH program.
"Teaming with Amazon Web Services will give NIH researchers powerful cloud-based resources to more efficiently collaborate and analyze data," NIH Chief Information Officer Andrea Norris said in a statement today. "Expanding our cloud service provider network will allow us to provide the research community access to the tools they need to advance science."
STRIDES aims to establish industry partnerships to provide agency-funded researchers access to "the most advanced, cost-effective computational infrastructure, tools, and services available," NIH said at the time of the launch. This includes training for researchers to learn about the latest tools and technologies.
The program also will involve collaborations with the NIH Data Commons Pilot cloud computing initiative.