More cloudy goodness in NeCTAR funding round

The University of Tasmania is among the latest institutions to get cloud funding, announcing that it’s won two projects worth more than $AU2 million under the federal government’s NeCTAR program.

The National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources [apparently, in this age of austerity, someone’s saving money by eliminating punctuation - El Reg] funding will provide $AU900,000 for a Tasmanian research cloud node, and $AU1.3 million for a marine virtual laboratory. Earlier this year, a cloud data storage node was set up in the island state.

NeCTAR has already established three research cloud nodes. As well as the new Tasmanian node, funding is now being provided for nodes at Western Australia’s iVEC, the Intersect Consortium in NSW, and the South Australian research cloud node.

In July, the Intersect Consortium announced that it will be buying a 33.3 TFlop machine from SGI based on 100 cluster nodes, with 1,600 cores powered by Intel Xenon E5-2500 processors. The South Australian facility is a mix of systems, as described here.

iVEC is also busy getting ready to handle the computing needs of Australia’s SKA precursor instruments at Murchison.

As well as Tasmania’s marine virtual laboratory, the NeCTAR round two projects will set up an industrial ecology virtual laboratory at the University of Sydney, a biodiversity and climate change lab at Griffith University in Queensland, an endocrine genomics lab at the University of Melbourne, and a human communication lab at the University of Western Sydney. ®