Case Study: The Water Institute of The Gulf accelerates storm surge simulations and reduces costs with Amazon Web Services

The Water Institute of the Gulf runs compute-heavy storm surge and wave simulations on AWS

The Water Institute of The Gulf needed a way to run compute-heavy storm surge and wave simulations for Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan, but traditional supercomputing centers made it hard to secure enough processors quickly and keep projects on schedule. The organization turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS), using AWS cloud computing for its hurricane and flood-risk modeling workloads.

With Amazon Web Services, The Water Institute of The Gulf used Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, Amazon FSx for Lustre, and Amazon ParallelCluster to increase throughput, cut costs, and speed up analysis. The team completed 645 hurricane simulations in three and a half days instead of an estimated three months, while using 48 processors for a job that typically required 256 and saving nearly 45% versus private supercomputing vendors.

The Water Institute of The Gulf

Zach Cobell

Numerical Modeler