Our Research Cloud Investment

Two months ago, the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) invited applications from organisations able to provide underpinning infrastructure services to maintain the current capacity of the ARDC’s Nectar Research Cloud. We are excited to announce a total investment of $4.1 million, with matching co-investment from partner organisations, for this core research infrastructure that directly benefits the wider research community.

Our investment of $4.1 million is split across four Australian organisations—The University of Melbourne, Monash University, The Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing and Intersect Australia—and we are very excited to be able to build on existing partnerships to deliver a national cloud resource that enables nationally competitive research, free to Australian researchers for another three years.

The Nectar Research Cloud provides computing infrastructure and supporting core services to over 16,000 researchers in over 1,600 currently active projects, enabling Australia’s research community to store, access, and analyse data, remotely, rapidly and autonomously. It provides self-service access to computing infrastructure, software, and data in a fast and efficient way and the distributed help desk ensures assistance is both available and locally appropriate.

The Nectar Research Cloud is a hybrid resource, partially funded by the ARDC and partially funded by institutions, and while locally funded resources will maintain their existing allocation processes, to further simplify access to all Australian researchers, allocations of ARDC-supported compute resources will be based on researchers’ nationally-awarded research grants and will be directed to the most appropriate provider. As a national infrastructure provider, we are particularly appreciative of our partners’ willingness to support researchers outside their organisations and enabling the ARDC-funded resources of the Nectar Research Cloud to be available to all Australian researchers.