All Nectar Research Cloud sites work together to provide a common interface for access to cloud resources with a high level of interoperability across all these sites. Most of the services provided by the Research Cloud are supported at all sites in the federation.

There are some useful Nectar cloud services which are currently available only at particular sites in the Nectar federation. The matrix below specifies the main services of this kind, and the sites where they are available. 

Shared File System Service

The Nectar shared filesystem service provides a simple interface for provisioning and managing shared file systems that can be mounted on multiple Virtual Machines. Access to these systems can be via NFS, CIFS (SMB) or CEPHFS, depending on the site.

See the Shared File System service support page for more information.

GPUs

Graphics processing units (GPUs) are available at some sites for special workloads. Access to GPUs are available by arrangement with the particular site. Please file a request with our helpdesk if you are interested. You must be associated with a node member listed above to access it. 

Big Memory

Standard Nectar flavors provide up to the Huge size, with 360GB RAM with the h3.xxlarge flavor. Some Nectar sites cannot provide Virtual Machine flavors that exceed this, contact the helpdesk for more information.

• University of Melbourne, TPAC and Auckland can provide VMs with up to 256GB RAM.

Huge RAM flavors are a very limited resource and users will need to provide a strong justification in their use case through the allocation request form in order to be granted permission to use these flavors.

Windows VMs

Due to Microsoft licensing requirements, access to Windows for Virtual Machines is by arrangement with the particular site. Please file a request with our helpdesk if you’re interested. You must be associated with a node member listed above to access it.

Volume Storage backup

Some sites do not support the Volume Storage backup service. Please contact our helpdesk if you’d like to discuss backup arrangements for Volume Storage at sites where the Volume Storage backup service is not available.

University of Auckland Services

The Auckland node (hosted by University of Auckland) is a private node, which means its Nectar compute resources are currently available only for qualified University of Auckland users. If you're a member of University of Auckland, the allocation application process is the same as the rest of Nectar, but you will be restricted to launching instances in the Auckland availability zone. Conversely, other Nectar node users cannot launch instances in the Auckland zone. We do offer several services specific to UoA users, including Windows instances, licensed software, and a range of GPUs. 

Please see the Auckland-specific services page for more information.

Please email nectarinfo@auckland.ac.nz if you have any further queries specific to the Auckland node.