US Academics Call for a National Research Cloud — Financial Times

US academics are calling to create a National Research Cloud to harness the power of cloud computing, further develop artificial intelligence, and to avoid falling behind a fast-moving tech industry.

The Financial Times says the US can look to Australia, where the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) Nectar Research Cloud has provided Australian researchers with on-demand computing infrastructure and software since 2012.

Rosie Hicks, CEO of ARDC, said about our research cloud: “We are not interested in a vanilla computing environment. We want to be pushing boundaries and create an environment that researchers cannot get elsewhere.”

Read the article from the Financial Times, “Academics edge closer to dream of research on cloud platforms.”

About Australia’s National Research Cloud

The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) Nectar Research Cloud (Nectar) is Australia’s national research cloud, providing cloud computing services and tools to Australian researchers.

Nectar launched in 2012 as the first national research cloud designed for Australian researchers, and is used by scientists and researchers throughout Australia, from their offices and homes.

Nectar provides Australia’s research community with fast, interactive, self-service access to large-scale computing infrastructure, software and data, and is a powerful platform for collaboration. Its versatile cloud infrastructure can be used in many different ways to support research, such as a virtual desktop for a single researcher, or a powerful computational server that can be shared by researchers in Australia and internationally.

In the past week, a refresh of Nectar was completed, doubling its capacity for Australian researchers. Current projects on Nectar are advancing machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, and exploring best practices for using containers and kubernetes for research software.

Nectar is hosted at our partner institutions: The University of Melbourne, Monash University, The Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing (TPAC), Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF), Intersect, Swinburne University and the University of Auckland.

Researchers can access cloud computing resources to meet their varied needs without the need to invest in hardware. Nectar is specifically designed for research computing and has defined and established national research computing standards that enable collaboration on a national and international scale.

Australian researchers can try Nectar via a free project trial for 6 months. Allocation on Nectar is then available to those conducting research of national merit in Australia at no cost.

Learn more about the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud.