Dear Nectar Research Cloud users, 

As part of the ARDC cloud refresh, on Wednesday Oct 14, 2020, we added 5,120 new AMD EPYC 2 cores to the melbourne-qh2 AZ to replace 4,096 old Intel Xeon v3 cores from the last refresh back in 2014-2015. Instances launched on or after this date automatically go on the new cores. 

The differences including performance benchmarks are documented here: https://docs.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/benchmarks/winter_2020/

Other than significant performance improvements, the AMD EPYC 2 platform has better CPU-level security than the Intel ones, which have had highly publicised vulnerabilities in the last few years. The AMD EPYC 2 CPUs also have a much lower TDP (thermal design power) per physical core, only 3.1W vs 8.4W on the old Intel Xeon v3/v4 cores, which gives us a lower power footprint in our University Queensberry St Datacentre. 

There will be further communications sent out shortly to each project about migrating your VMs on the old hardware in melbourne-qh2 AZ to these new ones. 

If you encounter any issue as a result of this change, please log a support ticket with us at: https://support.ehelp.edu.au

Kind regards, 
The Melbourne Node Research Cloud support team