Alan Williams, Associate Director, NCI
In this video from the HPC Advisory Council Australia Conference, Alan Williams from NCI presents: HPC vs. Cloud – The Return on Investment in eResearch.
“Explore the services and technology at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), based in Canberra, Australia, with Allan Williams, and the delivery of HPC, Cloud and Storage services to Australian researchers around the country.”
NCI Australia is the nation’s most highly integrated high-performance research computing environment, providing world-class services to government, industry, and researchers. We are committed to delivering on national priorities and research excellence, and are driven by our primary objective of raising the ambition, impact and outcomes of Australian research. Based at The Australian National University, NCI is home to the Southern Hemisphere’s fastest supercomputer, its highest performance research cloud, its fastest filesystems and Australia’s largest research data repository—all supported by an expert team of nationally and internationally recognized staff.
NCI offers two distinct versions of cloud based on OpenStack:
- NeCTAR Research Cloud (Public Cloud) – open to any researcher affiliated with an Australian university
- Tenjin (Private Cloud) – open to members of NCI’s official partner organisations
Both cloud environments offer access to:
- Virtual Laboratories and other specialised environments, e.g. the Australian Geoscience Data Cube
- Data services, e.g. the CMIP5 climate dataset through the Earth System Grid Federation
In addition, NCI’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, an interactive environment for data visualization and analysis in the cloud operates on the Tenjin supercomputer.
See more talks from the HPC Advisory Council Australia Conference
