The ARDC Nectar Research Cloud is Australia’s federated research cloud and a core facility of the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). This distributed research infrastructure provides Australia’s research community with fast & interactive access to computing infrastructure, software, and data.
The Research Cloud’s transformative impact enables researchers to store, access, and analyse their data at any time, create dedicated virtual servers on-demand, and collaborate with others from their desktop in a fast and efficient way. As of its 10th birthday, it has empowered 20,921 CIs to work on 4,852 ground-breaking research projects. Ithas supported 414 Australian Research Council and 186 National Health and Medical Research Council grants.
As the engine room of transformative impact, the Research Cloud at Monash is a complex and large scale environment that requires active collaboration between researchers, the Monash eResearch Centre (MeRC) and Monash ICT (eSolutions).
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The term cloud means many things to many people. The Research Cloud is…
- A private cloud.
- A federation of clouds across Australia (Nectar).
- Research infrastructure – it can behave like an instrument facility or lab.
- Bulk-buy of computing capacity by universities, for their researchers.
- A research-practice change agent, transitioning research into the world of DevOps, cloud-native, open-source and software-everything.
Peruse our research impact stories. The Research Cloud is a place for new research success stories. There you will find incremental success stories of research using the cloud, often written by our users and our staff in partnership. They give insight into the amazing research being done at Monash University, at our partners and beyond. They also introduce some facet or opportunity enabled by the Research Cloud, that would not otherwise happen.
ARDC’s Nectar Research Cloud introduced Australia to the “cloud age” of self-service. This allows researchers to store, access, and analyse their own data at any time, create dedicated virtual servers on demand, and collaborate with others from their desktop in a fast and efficient way. The Research Cloud at Monash is a node of the ARDC Research Cloud.
Tenancies provide access to capacity on the Research Cloud. Our tenancies include ARDC / Nectar, Monash University Research Cloud, Monash University HPC (MASSIVE / MonARCH), RMIT University and the partner shares scheme. When applying for access, you are affectively asking one or more of these tenants to provide you with capacity.
Monash eResearch Centre IaaS team builds and operates the Research Cloud at Monash. It is an engineering centre for digital research infrastructure, with numerous computing industry partners, significant leverage of open source and devops approaches. Researchers work with this team to bring novel computing technologies into the computers/stack that they use. Peruse our infrastructure stories to learn about our open source and research infrastructure success.
Partners are key to the success of the Research Cloud. Sometimes we partner with other facets of the University. Sometimes we partner with other eResearch capabilities. Sometimes we partner with industry. Sometimes we contribute to the globe’s open source projects.