Ms Carmel Walsh1, Dr Paul Coddington2
1ARDC, Sydney, Australia, 2UNSW, Sydney, Australia
With the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud reaching its 10th anniversary in January 2022 we reflect on its development, impact and contribution to sustainable national research infrastructure for Australia and nationally.
The Nectar Research Cloud was one of the first projects in the world to build a large-scale national research cloud service, and the first to do so as a federation of distributed infrastructure providers from multiple organisations. It pioneered the use of open source OpenStack technology for research computing and implemented a national research cloud that was cost effective, with easy self-service access, and focused on research requirements by reducing barriers to cross-institutional collaboration. From its origins at the University of Melbourne in 2012, we have seen it grow across our Node partners nationally; influence the use of OpenStack for research internationally and become an exemplar for the development of other national and international research clouds.
Since it began, Nectar has supported more than 5,000 projects, and underpinned the development, operation and expansion of many Virtual Laboratories, Platforms, and other digital research services that collectively have tens of thousands of users.
Learn more about how the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud has evolved by developing and continuously improving innovative services to meet the diverse needs of our thousands of users across all research disciplines.
Biography:
Dr Paul Coddington is the Associate Director of the Research Cloud and Storage at the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). Paul leads the Nectar Research Cloud and has more than 35 years experience in eResearch including cloud computing, high-performance and distributed computing, computational science, software development, data repositories, research platforms, and project and program management.
Carmel Walsh has been the Director of eResearch Infrastructure and Services at SRDC since 2020. She leads the Storage and Compute Portfolio which delivers the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud, national storage and the Data Retention Program. Carmel has over 15 years experience in the tertiary education section in Australia and significant experience in IT infrastructure and service management and education across multiple industries in public, commercial and private sectors.