Your brain is extravagantly equipped for visualization. More than 50% of your cerebral cortex is dedicated to processing sensory input from your eyes, making it the information super highway that helps complex ideas form in your head incredibly quickly. Our output devices – our limbs and our voices – had to develop unique articulation skills, just to match the speed at which we can learn from seeing.

So, it’s fitting that today we’re announcing Research and Engineering Studio on AWS (RES), a self-service portal to help scientists and engineers access and manage their research and design workspaces, including virtual desktops to see their data and run their interactive applications in the cloud.

Setting up – and then managing – virtual desktops manually takes a lot of work, taking time away from the core mission of research and development groups: solving hard scientific problems. We’ve also noticed that when processes to access resources become complicated, users often take shortcuts (like sharing passwords or setting file permissions to be globally read/write).

With RES, we’re putting all the launch and monitoring tools behind a single pane of glass, so administrators can deploy new desktop environments quickly, from their own pre-prepared library of software images and trusted applications. This gives their users the freedom to come and go when needed – incredibly important when chasing new lines of inquiry – without impacting their budgets or the security posture of their organization.

In today’s post, we’ll explain what RES is and how it works, and we’ll explain how to deploy it in your own AWS account, and get it ready for your users…

Read the full blog

Reminder: You can learn a lot from AWS HPC engineers by subscribing to the HPC Tech Short YouTube channel, and following the AWS HPC Blog channel.