The continual evolution of Nectar – Australia’s National Research Cloud

Dr Paul Coddington¹, Dr Carmel Walsh², Ms Jo Morris³

¹Australian Research Data Commons, Adelaide, Australia
²Australian Research Data Commons, Sydney, Australia
³Australian Research Data Commons, Brisbane, Australia

The ARDC’s Nectar Research Cloud has undergone a recent refresh which has more than doubled the capacity available for national project allocations. Additional infrastructure is being provisioned to support the requirements of the ARDC Platforms projects and other nationally prioritised activities, focussing on high-end infrastructure such as GPUs and large memory servers. We are also exploring the use of commercial clouds for national research computing and multi-cloud integration.

The talk will highlight how we approach continual service improvement, designing and scaling new services for national benefit and trialling and testing innovative technology at scale, ensuring we have a responsive and adaptive national research cloud for an increasingly digital research ecosystem.

Several new cloud services are being developed and will be deployed on the Nectar cloud over the next year. These include preemptible instances to provide projects with additional capacity, a national GPU service, a reservation system for resources with high demand (including GPUs), a JupyterHub service, and a virtual desktop service. Improvements have been made to several existing services, and to cybersecurity and support for handling sensitive data. A new national training strategy is also being implemented with a focus on improving onboarding of new users.

ARDC has built a large community through our ARDC Platforms projects, enabling us to design, test and scale these new services with this extended community. The new and improved infrastructure, services and capabilities of Nectar will support the requirements of Platforms for image processing, machine learning, drones, genomics, ecosystems science, and sensitive data.

Biography:

Carmel Walsh is the Director of eResearch Infrastructure and Services at the Australian Research Data Commons.

Paul Coddington is the Associate Director, Research Cloud and Storage at the Australian Research Data Commons. He has been responsible for the Nectar Research Cloud since 2017 and has 30 years of experience in the eResearch sector.

Jo Morris is the User Support Manager, Research Cloud and Storage at the Australian Research Data Commons.

Jo has an IT background and has worked in the Tertiary Education sector for over 20 years with the last 10 focused on supporting research.