The year 2020 has brought many unprecedented challenges — like wildfires millions of acres in size or a global pandemic that required schools around the world to quickly design and deploy remote learning solutions.

Cloud scalability is one asset that can be invaluable in tackling some of these problems, according to Rebecca Weekly (pictured), senior director of hyperscale strategy and execution and senior principal engineer at Intel.

“We work on technology. We hope that we get to empower people through that technology,” Weekly said. “But when you can deploy that technology at cloud scale and watch the world solve problems faster, that has made … 2020 unique in the positivity.”

Weekly spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed how cloud scalability is helping researchers answer questions faster — and solve some of the world’s toughest and most pressing problems. (*Disclosure below.)

Pulling value out of the past with the cloud

Wildfires around the world have recently caused mass damage and chaos. This is the type of disaster Intel and its partners are helping to solve through advancing technology.

“We saw a kind of a climate-change set of challenges with the wildfires that occurred this year in 2020,” said Weekly, explaining some of the use cases for Intel’s technology to help solve critical world problems. “We worked with RONIN, who is a partner with AWS and Intel, and used the EC2 C5 instances that have the second-gen Intel Xeon scalable processors. And we used them to be able to help the [Australian wildfire researchers] increase over 60-fold the number of parallel wildfire simulations that they could perform.”

The cloud may also be essential for businesses wanting to put old data to use. Most of this information is unstructured data — stores of unorganized, uncategorized information that can have a lot of value, but only if broken down into a form more suitable for data analysis.

“So, really large unstructured data — which is the vast majority of data stored in the world — is exploding,” Weekly stated. “And one of the last [examples] that I absolutely love to cover of the wide scope of the ways that cloud is changing the innovation landscape, is Model9, which is basically a company that allows people to take decades of insights out of their mainframe data and do something with it.” 

Model9 leverages AWS’ cloud storage to break down that mainframe data into a usable, analyzable format. This is one example of many that illustrate how Intel and its partners are using technology to change the world, Weekly concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS re:Invent. (*Disclosure: Intel sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Intel nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE