Speaker
Description
The Nectar Research Cloud has been supporting Australian national research since 2012. In the last 18 months the ARDC has doubled Nectar’s national capacity and increased its investment in leading-edge technology. This has enabled ARDC Nectar to be flexible in responding to changing research demands and challenges during the COVID-19 Pandemic.
The talk will highlight how we have approached significant growth in demand, completing a comprehensive refresh program whilst also maintaining high levels of service provision with
continual service improvement, designing and scaling new services for national benefit and trialling and testing innovative technology at scale, ensuring we have a responsive and adaptive national research cloud for an increasingly digital research ecosystem.
ARDC has built a large community through our ARDC Research Platforms projects that are developing virtual research environments, enabling us to design, test and scale these new services with this extended community. The new and improved infrastructure, services and capabilities of Nectar will support the requirements of research platforms for image processing, machine learning, drones, genomics, ecosystems science, and sensitive data.
I will also discuss some case studies in which we were quickly able to provision urgently needed additional compute for Covid-19 modelling and responses to the pandemic in a time where supply chain issues and economic pressures made it more challenging.
