Development of new services for the Nectar Research Cloud
The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) 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.
Several new cloud services are being developed and will be deployed on the Nectar cloud during 2021/22. These include preemptible instances to provide projects with additional capacity, a GPU service, a reservation system for resources with high demand (including GPUs), a Jupyter notebook service, and a virtual desktop service. Improvements have been made to several existing services, and to cybersecurity and support for handling sensitive data.
The talk will provide an overview of these new cloud services and our approach to designing new services and trialling and testing innovative technology at scale, ensuring we have a responsive and adaptive research cloud for an increasingly digital research ecosystem. We will also outline our collaborative approach to the operation of the Nectar federation and the development of a community of practice in open cloud infrastructure, and the benefits of the federation to our Nectar federation partners in Australia and New Zealand.
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 cloud requirements of Platforms for image processing, machine learning, drones, genomics, ecosystems science, and sensitive data.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
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.
