The ARDC and AARNet are excited to announce that the new national node of the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud is now operational, hosted by AARNet at its secure advanced data centre in Sydney.

The ARDC Nectar Research Cloud offers researchers across Australia quick and easy access to powerful computing resources, software, and data.

The new national node provides additional capacity and resilience for important services like the ARDC Virtual Desktop Service, JupyterHub Service, and BinderHub Service, which are seeing a rapid increase in usage. It also supports various national research platforms and projects, particularly those handling sensitive data, and provides additional capacity and support for researchers with no local node of Nectar.

ARDC and AARNet are working towards securing ISO27001 certification for the national node by late 2025 to support researchers working with sensitive data. This cybersecurity enhancement for Nectar will enable key research initiatives within the ARDC. These include enabling federated learning and establishing trusted national research environments in the People Research Data Commons for health and medical research, and supporting the Australian Dataspaces initiative, which will soon create secure ecosystems for sensitive data exchange among research, industry and government sectors in Australia.

Ben Chiu, Director of Services at ARDC, shared, "Partnering with AARNet highlights our commitment to bolstering Australian researchers with the necessary digital tools. Launching the new national Nectar node is a big step in providing secure, reliable, and scalable cloud infrastructure to address the grand challenges facing Australian society."

Ryan Fraser, Director of Digital Research at AARNet, added, "AARNet and ARDC share a commitment to providing Australian researchers with world-class digital infrastructure. A key part of this partnership is delivering a reliable and secure hosting environment for the new national Nectar node, ensuring researchers have the tools they need to drive discovery and innovation."

Learn more about the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud.

The ARDC is enabled by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) to support national digital research infrastructure for Australian researchers.

Written by Jo Savill, ARDC. Reviewed by Ben Chiu, Dr Paul Coddington (ARDC), Jane Gifford (AARNet).