New Nectar Node at the University of Adelaide Launched

We’re excited to announce the new ARDC Nectar Research Cloud node hosted by the University of Adelaide is now live.

On 24 February, over 120 people joined the ARDC and the University of Adelaide showcase on the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud (Nectar). Adelaide-based researchers shared how they use Nectar for their research.

Speakers at the showcase highlighted the collaborative effort that has contributed to establishing the new Nectar node, and highlighted South Australian examples of using Nectar for research.

Professor Michael Goodsite, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research Operations and Commercialisation), University of Adelaide, officially opened the Nectar showcase by welcoming guests and introducing the new cloud computing and HPC partnership between the University of Adelaide, ARDC and Intersect. He highlighted this launch – alongside the historic merger with the University of South Australia – as a key step toward transforming research and education in South Australia.

Dr Stephen Love, Director Research Infrastructure and Platforms, Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President (Research), University of Adelaide, discussed the significant updates and changes to the University of Adelaide’s high performance computing (HPC) capacity and technical environment thanks to the launch of the new Nectar node. He also recognised the importance of the people and communities that came together to establish the new Nectar node, acknowledging ARDC, Intersect, the internal staff at the University of Adelaide and others.

Ben Chiu, Director, Services, ARDC, provided a high-level overview of ARDC and Nectar and celebrated the work of the University of Adelaide and all involved in the launch. He highlighted the new collaboration opportunities the new node enables.

Dr Terry Bertozzi, South Australian Museum and South Australian Regional Facility for Molecular Ecology and Evolution, The University of Adelaide, emphasised the flexibility and advantages that the Nectar environment brought to his research and praised the Nectar training team for their documentation and support. Dr Bertozzi highlighted how Nectar benefits higher degree by research (HDR) students and researchers. He also discussed his use of Nectar in his own research with phylogenomics and population analyses of the diversity in snub-nosed gobies from around Australia and the Indo-Pacific (Hammer et al. 2021).

David M Lawrence, Senior Bioinformatics Research Fellow, ACRF Cancer Genomics Facility, Centre for Cancer Biology, discussed how he and Yasir Kusay use Nectar virtual machines (VMs) to host Bioinformatics web apps. Their current web apps on Nectar are:

• VariantGrid test – variant database / analysis platform
• RUNX1db – instance of VariantGrid for a rare disease
• cdot REST API – transcript JSON API
• Transect – gene expression correlations.

Dr Paul Coddington, Associate Director and Sonia Ramza, User Support Manager, ARDC Nectar Research Cloud, discussed Nectar in greater detail, including what researchers can do with Nectar. They shared a selection of exciting research platforms hosted on Nectar and the services available right now for researchers to use.

The ARDC Nectar Research Cloud (Nectar) is Australia’s national research cloud for researchers and research institutions. It provides fast, interactive, self-service access to large-scale computing infrastructure, software and data. It is also a powerful platform for collaboration. Since its launch in 2012, Nectar has enabled over 26,000 users to work on more than 5,500 projects. Nectar also powers national services for virtual desktops, Jupyter Notebooks, BinderHub and GPUs. It’s easy to access at no cost to eligible researchers.

During a question-and-answer session at the end of the showcase, attendees expressed enthusiasm for the new node, enquiring about the availability of resources such as GPUs.

Training for the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud

An in-person training was held at the University of Adelaide on Thursday 27 February 2025. The training was well received. Here’s some feedback from attendees:

“An excellent introduction on how the Nectar node could be used. From this training, it should inspire researchers on how they can use the Nectar service”

“Clear information provided, and being able to work through activities was a great touch”

“I learned about how availability zones work, which is new to my experience of cloud. I also learned about where to find more training resources and look forward to continuing to learn in my own time.”

The next training will be online on Thursday 31 July. To be notified of upcoming live Nectar training events, register your interest.

For more information on upcoming Nectar events and learning resources, please visit our Support Centre.

The ARDC is enabled by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) to support national digital research infrastructure for Australian researchers.