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The number one United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> is to eliminate poverty, leaving nobody behind. Researchers in the United Kingdom are harnessing the large-scale data-processing power of Microsoft Azure to map the location of every person on Earth to provide the accurate population statistics needed to achieve this international humanitarian goal.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are about 2 billion people in the world today who are so poor that they earn less every day than the price of a cappuccino,\u201d explains Claire Melamed, Executive Director of The Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n For decades, poverty has been the premier predictor of the general health and economic development needs of the world\u2019s most vulnerable populations. Conventional means of assessing poverty, such as national census and household survey data, cannot provide the necessary detailed situational views in a timely manner for aid providers to be fully effective. In 2012, for example, one of the world\u2019s largest foundations funded the distribution of polio vaccines in northern Nigeria using 2006 census data. Workers either ran out of vaccines or returned with unused supplies due to the lack of more detailed population information.<\/p>\n The WorldPop research team (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> at the University of Southampton, U.K., provides critical data for tracking the UN Sustainable Development Goals by counting every person on Earth<\/a>, where they are and who they are. The team does this using novel data science techniques and cloud computing to combine large datasets drawn from census, surveys, satellite, GIS and other sources to provide governments and NGOs with extremely detailed spatial and temporal mappings\u2014some with resolutions down to 100 meters square. \u201cThe datasets can be so large and complex that it\u2019s impractical or impossible to build them on a single workstation,\u201d says Andy Tatem, a professor of geography and environment at the University of Southampton and the director of the WorldPop initiative. \u201cBut now our researchers are able to cut them down to size with the compute clusters and parallel computing that Microsoft Azure provides.\u201d<\/p>\n For example, consider WorldPop researcher Maksym Bondarenko. He is working on an ambitious global analysis project to draw a range of insightful predictions and calculations from geospatial data for every country in the world at a resolution of 100 square meters, which involves processing 800 million cells of data. Bondarenko built a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster on Azure (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, using A8-A9 virtual machines that support ultrafast InfiniBand network connections. This high-performance networking is used in many supercomputers, and is necessary to scale beyond a few machines.<\/p>\n \u201cAzure was the only cloud that gave us true supercomputing performance,\u201d says Tatem.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/afghanistan-census-1000x400.jpg\")
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