PULSE Lab Selected for FSU/AWS Award: High-Performance Cloud Computing for Ocean Circulation Surrogates and AI-Enabled Data Exploration

We are excited to share that the PULSE Lab was selected as one of eleven faculty-led projects funded through the FSU/AWS Research Acceleration Fund!

Our project

High-Performance Cloud Computing for Ocean Circulation Surrogates and AI-Enabled Data Exploration

• PI: Dr. Olmo Zavala-Romero (Scientific Computing)
• Co-PIs: Dr. Hristo Chipilski, Keshav Raja

Only eleven projects across Florida State University received this award in 2026. We are grateful to be among them.

What this award supports

The FSU/AWS Research Acceleration Fund provides up to $20,000 in AWS credits over a two-year award period, with priority support for high-performance computing and machine learning workloads. For our lab, this cloud infrastructure will help accelerate research on AI surrogates for ocean circulation and AI-enabled exploration of large oceanographic datasets — areas where traditional numerical simulations and local compute resources can become bottlenecks.

By leveraging AWS high-performance cloud computing, we aim to develop faster, scalable tools for studying ocean dynamics while making data-intensive analysis more accessible to the broader research team.

Why it matters

Ocean circulation models are essential for forecasting, climate research, and understanding mesoscale processes — but they are computationally demanding. Surrogate models powered by scientific machine learning offer a path to faster inference and richer data exploration, provided the compute pipeline can keep pace. This award gives us the cloud resources to prototype, train, and evaluate those approaches at scale.

We look forward to sharing progress from this work as the project moves forward. Learn more about the program on the FSU Office of Research funding page.