George Washington University (GW) has been honored as a 2025 AWS Champions Award winner for its innovative use of AWS to amplify the capabilities of its high-performance computing (HPC) environment. By seamlessly integrating AWS with its on-premises Pegasus HPC system, GW has empowered researchers with greater flexibility, faster execution times, and access to advanced compute architectures. This is enabling cutting-edge research across scientific disciplines.

Project Overview
GW’s flagship Pegasus HPC system supports a range of computational research across the university. To meet growing demand and enhance its research infrastructure, GW extended Pegasus with AWS services, offering burst compute capabilities, novel architecture access, and elastic provisioning through a loosely coupled hybrid model.

The setup includes tools that let GW use its existing internet addresses, connect quickly through a high-speed research network, and run jobs using familiar systems, whether in the cloud or on campus. By making the cloud environment look and feel like GW’s own systems, researchers can work the same way they always have, while getting faster results and more computing power when they need it.

Challenges Addressed: Modernizing HPC Without Disruption
Scientific institutions often struggle with the limitations of legacy HPC systems, which are costly, inflexible, and slow to scale. GW faced challenges such as:

• Inadequate access to novel compute architectures 
• Long provisioning cycles delaying research timelines 
• Limited ability to scale high-throughput workloads quickly 
• Need for seamless integration between cloud and on-prem environments 
• Complexity in managing network performance and access policies 

By leveraging AWS, GW overcame these hurdles with an architecture that preserves existing workflows while unlocking the elasticity and performance of the cloud.

Results: Faster Research, Greater Flexibility, Seamless User Experience
GW’s hybrid approach delivered measurable results across performance, scalability, and user experience:

• Reduced provisioning time from weeks to minutes for high-capacity compute workloads 
• Improved workload execution speed and reliability using AWS’s elastic infrastructure 
• Enhanced throughput and research agility, particularly for data-intensive scientific computations 
• Reliable high-performance networking through Internet2 I2PX, maintaining low-latency connectivity between cloud and campus 

Pioneering the Future of Cloud-Enabled Research
George Washington University is setting a benchmark for how research institutions can augment and modernize their HPC environments using AWS. By blending the stability of legacy systems with the flexibility and power of cloud services, GW has created a high-performance research platform that meets today’s demands and tomorrow’s possibilities.