Do you need more computing power for your research? Cloud computing may be what you need, and the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud is here to provide it.
Cloud computing is used by researchers from all fields of research that need to collaborate, analyse large datasets, and run software, models and workflows.
The ARDC Nectar Research Cloud (Nectar) is a national cloud service designed to be used for research, operated as a national federation by the ARDC and our partner organisations. Eligible Australian researchers can use Nectar at no cost, thanks to the support of the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) and co-investment from our partners.
Nectar has been operating for more than 11 years and is used by thousands of researchers across Australia for their cloud computing needs.
Nectar is a powerful platform for collaboration that allows researchers and research support staff to access compute resources, software and data from their offices and homes and easily share them with collaborators at other institutions.
The cloud can be used for a variety of research activities, from hosting a website or running your analysis to being able to run software that needs a particular operating system, just to name a few. Real-world examples of research done on Nectar include:
Australian researchers can start a 6-month trial immediately by logging in with their institutional account via the Australian Access Federation (AAF). Researchers can request a longer-term allocation of cloud resources via the Nectar dashboard, if they are eligible.
A variety of services are also available on-demand and accessible instantly with your institutional account via the AAF. These include the Jupyter Notebook Service and Virtual Desktop Service.
