Nectar GPU Service

The Nectar GPU service has been made available for researchers to access high end resources which would not otherwise be available to them. All projects with a national allocation status are eligible to use this service. You may also be eligible via your local Node: please contact our Helpdesk for more information.

Important Security Reminder

Please ensure you have read and are in compliance with our Security Guidelines, as per the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud Terms of Use. Our Online Tutorial on Security practices on the Nectar Cloud provides practical steps you can take to maintain security on Nectar.

For more information about what a GPU is, view these resources:

• A video titled GPUs: Explained by IBM Technology
• Beta Carpentries course which includes an explanation about GPUs, and GPU programming tutorials

GPUs are available to use via making a booking using the Nectar Reservation Service. Booking length is minimum 1 day with a maximum of 1 month, with ability to extend pending availability.

Currently, 2 flavor classes are provided:

• G1: Contains Nvidia A40 GPUs which bring state-of-the-art features for ray-traced rendering, simulation and virtual production.
• G2: Contains Nvidia A100 GPUs and provides the highest performance for machine learning training and high performance computing in the cloud.

The specifications (RAM, vCPUs), are listed on our Nectar Flavors page.

Note: All flavors use Nvidia virtual GPU technology meaning the GPU your instance has access to is shared. All flavors have a minimum guaranteed slice alongside dedicated GPU RAM with bigger flavors having a larger minimum slice of computing power.

Launch a GPU instance

Once you have made a Reservation, you need to run through the standard process to Launch an instance, by selecting the appropriate Image and Flavor.

The Flavor that contains the particular GPU resources you reserved can be found on the detail page for the reservation. You can find this by clicking the reservation ID. 

It would look something similar to what is pictured below.

Image Boot Source

When you are in the Launch Instance window, you should see the option appear in the list of images under the Source tab.

The image is specially built for use with a GPU. You need to select one of the images with '(NVIDIA GPU)' in the title. As per its name, it is our standard Nectar image, but includes the NVIDIA vGPU driver installed.

The provided image also contains the appropriate licensing required to run the GPU hardware, which is automatically configured for you. If the current image isn’t sufficient, or you want to use your own image, reach out to us for help. You can lodge a support ticket.

Flavor

Similarly, your reservation should appear under the Flavor tab.

Check the GPU

Once you have launched your instance, you can check the GPU and provided license is active using the following command:

nvidia-smi -q

The output will contain information about the attached GPU, and at the bottom, should show the licensed status as 'licensed'.