About the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC)
The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) is is building Australia’s research data infrastructure. We provide Australian researchers with access to national research data collections, cloud computing, platforms and data-intensive research skills training.
For over 10 years, we have been providing services to researchers across Australia. We work with all universities in Australia, medical research institutes, government agencies, overseas organisations and more.
Top 3 Resources to Accelerate Your Health and Medical Research Now
Through a number of our services and co-investment projects, we provide health and medical researchers with access to datasets, free digital research tools and upskilling materials.
These include the following 3 resources – and you’ll find more further down:
HOW WE SUPPORT HEALTH AND MEDICAL RESEARCHERS
Dr Steffen Bollmann and Mr Aswin Narayanan lead the development of the neuroimaging data analysis environment Neurodesk, now available through the ARDC Virtual Desktop Service.
Steffen Bollmann
Aswin Narayanan
National Imaging Facility Informatics Fellow, The University of Queensland
Professor James McCaw and his team have been modelling infectious diseases, including COVID-19, on the ARDC’s cloud computing service for 10 years.
James McCaw
Stay Up to Date: Get Your Free Guide for Data-Intensive Research in Health and Medical Sciences
You’ll also receive our fortnightly newsletter ARDC Connect, which shares latest news, events, training and resources for data-intensive research in Australia.
Datasets for Health and Medical Research
ARDC Research Data Australia
Find, access and reuse data for research from over 100 Australian data sources.
Research Data Australia is the ARDC’s portal to research data and associated projects, researchers and data services from more than 100 Australian data sources, including research organisations, government agencies and cultural institutions.
Research Data Australia offers access to data in medical and health sciences and other areas of interest to health and medical researchers. This includes The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) next-generation sequencing (NGS) datasets.
Free Tools for Health and Medical Research
ARDC Nectar Research Cloud
Accelerate your research with cloud compute resources, software and data that can be accessed anywhere. Start your 6-month trial.
The Nectar Research Cloud allows fast, remote access to reliable computational capabilities, software and data.
Australian researchers can use the Nectar Research Cloud to develop and host services including databases, data repositories, web services and tools, and large-scale research platforms or virtual research environments.
We host services for earth and environmental science researchers on the Nectar Research Cloud, which can save time, boost your productivity, facilitate collaboration and give you added power to conduct your research:
Virtual Desktop Service
Access extra computing capabilities through Neurodesktop or any of the 5 other desktops we offer, which you can easily set up in minutes.
Jupyter Notebook Service
Develop, combine and export computational notebooks and interactive visualisations.
National GPU Service
Reserve GPUs and large-memory virtual machines in 16 flavours in advance for your research.
Preemptible Instances service
Access extra computational resources for a short period of time on demand.
The Nectar Research Cloud also hosts digital services provided by ARDC-supported projects and other National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) facilities, including Microscopy Australia and National Imaging Facility (NIF).
Services include:
- Degust – an interactive web tool for RNA-Seq exploration, analysis and visualisation
- iFeature – a Python toolkit and web server for calculating structural feature descriptors from protein and peptide sequences
- Stemformatics – a platform for quickly finding and visualising interesting genes in exemplar stem cell datasets.
We provide hands-on cloud computing training for all researchers. Topics include basic security and using containers on the Nectar Research Cloud.
To access our cloud computing training, visit the Nectar Research Cloud Learning and Training Support Centre.
We Are Building the People Research Data Commons
To meet the needs of health and medical researchers, the ARDC is co-designing a People Research Data Commons (People RDC) with partners in academia, industry and government and with other national stakeholders. The People RDC will support health and biomedical researchers to develop nation-wide, cross-sector and multi-disciplinary data collections and digital capabilities. This will include:
- national FAIR health data assets – both existing and new or improved data collections
- platforms and solutions that enable researchers to collect or generate data, analyse those data and produce FAIR data outputs
- long-term research infrastructure and services to support the research data lifecycle
- expertise in data and digital research infrastructure
- governance, policy, technology, collaboration and participation frameworks to enable success.
The People RDC is a long-term national infrastructure program supported by the Australian Government. Learn more and register your interest.