2nd Generation of the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud at Monash

ARDC’s Nectar Research Cloud is Australia’s first federated research cloud. This distributed research infrastructure provides Australia’s research community with fast & interactive access to computing infrastructure, software, and data. It is a powerful platform for collaboration. Its "cloud age" self-service model allows researchers to store, access, and analyse their own data at any time, create dedicated virtual servers on demand, and collaborate with others from their desktop in a fast and efficient way. The Research Cloud at Monash is accessible computing infrastructure tailored for both peak research initiatives and the needs of research at large. It is a novel research infrastructure, that has driven the adoption of open source / devops / CICD / software-defined methodologies, and in turn pioneering Monash's skills & capabilities for scaling out quality & smart research-led digital systems. It provides commodity to high performance configurations of compute, networks and storage (as Infrastructure as a Service - IaaS). Its blend of scale and performance, user-driven and low-latency has driven many technology innovations now commercialised by our partners. For example, it was the first to adopt HPC interconnects into the cloud, and it was a pioneer of GPUs for virtual desktops and ultimately AI. Most significantly – our co-design / co-operate service model, a partnership with researchers, is the very fabric that enables researchers and organisations to create and proliferate their very own 21st century equivalent of the humble microscope. The 2nd Generation of the Research Cloud at Monash sustains ARDC's capacity at the Monash node, and continues the investment in making novel computing hard and soft infrastructure accessible through self-service. The specialist focus for this generation is out-of-band security (via Smart-NICs), initial infrastructure for safe havens, AI/ML and explosion of containerisation especially through cloud-native mechanisms (Kubernetes).