Access to R@CMon and the Research Cloud is available to all Australian public-researchers, including for the purposes of industry engagement.
Resource allocation to the R@CMon and the Research Cloud is available through NeCTAR and RDS allocation schemes and institutional and/or group tenancies. Currently R@CMon manages approximately 5k cores of computing capacity with associated memory and disk available in pre-determined flavour configurations, available through the NeCTAR (including discretionary) tenancy, and a further 6k+ cores for private tenancies.
A catalog of public virtual machine images is available to choose from, or you can build your own. When a chosen image is booted in a flavor it is known as an active instance. By default when the instance is stopped (the owner terminates it or shuts it down), the hardware (including ephemeral storage) is freed for other users. We also have persistent storage in the form of virtual volumes which can be dynamically attached to and from instances.
Getting access and requesting NeCTAR or institutional allocations
This all done by the national dashboard – here, with self-service support information found here. If you would like to talk about large or small allocations of dedicated capacity then please contact rcmon-support@monash.edu. We can, for example, work to specify and provide quotes for infrastructure capacity required to support research grants.
Help! This sounds great but I don’t know how to cloud.
No problem. R@CMon is more than just self-service infrastructure, the Monash eResearch Centre offers services and consultation to add value to and help you get the most from the cloud, including:
- live demonstrations (we’ll come to you) and setup (R@CMon 101)
- prebuilt desktop and server environments (R@CMon 102), for example:
- web hosting
- data-management
- using the cloud as a high-throughput computer
- high-performance computing
- data-mining tools
- R@CMon programming APIs (R@CMon 201)
- integration with instrument and data resources
- help setting up and running virtual classrooms and labs
Please contact rcmon-support@monash.edu for more information on any of the above.
Additionally, the NeCTAR project is funding national projects to build services atop the cloud, these include virtual laboratories and eResearch tools. MeRC and NeCTAR can help you connect with scientists and engineers building cool widgets relevant to your domain.
Support
General support requests should be placed to the NeCTAR helpdesk, either online, via phone, or email. The helpdesk is a shared service operated throughout business hours by support staff across the NeCTAR federation. Helpdesk staff will escalate more specific issues to agents at a particular site if necessary.
You can also contact the R@CMon team directly via rcmon-support@monash.edu, please do so if you have specific queries or issues regarding the Research Cloud at Monash. This is also an appropriate contact to use if you need help (or we have already helped) to setup your Research Cloud application environment.
R@CMon tenancies
R@CMon is open for cloud infrastructure partnerships. This enables institutions to join the NeCTAR Research Cloud as its own tenancy without having to build or operate the hardware infrastructure. The R@CMon team will provision, deploy and operate the cloud infrastructure and provide a dedicated placement (aka availability zone) in the NeCTAR Research Cloud.
For research institutions this provides your very own prioritisation of resources to your own researchers. User projects can join allocations from across tenancies, paving a path to project co-contribution and standardisation of research systems.