The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) Nectar Research Cloud is a collection of nationally distributed nodes that host the cloud compute and storage infrastructure funded by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) program.

Following the shutdown of eRSA and the South Australian node, ARDC has announced it will continue to support allocation of Research Cloud resources to South Australian researchers.

From the post:

For the next 12 months, ARDC confirms continued support for allocation of Nectar Cloud resources to researchers at institutions who are not members of Nectar Cloud Nodes, including SA and WA researchers, through our national allocation processes:

• Projects that are eligible for a national allocation (see below) will be approved by the Nectar allocations committee, based on consultation with nodes to ensure that sufficient capacity is available.
• Project trials will continue to be available for SA, WA and non-node member researchers.

As previously advised, SA, WA and non-node member researchers will also continue to be supported in the following ways:

• If the project is a collaboration with researchers from institutions outside of SA or WA or with a node member researcher, one of those researchers can submit a Nectar project resource allocation request for the collaboration, which may simplify allocation approval.
• For projects that are not eligible for a national allocation, SA, WA and non-node member institutions or research groups may seek to negotiate access to resources from particular Research Cloud nodes, or users may seek access on a fee-for-service basis. Nectar can provide guidance on options for particular requirements.
• Some Nectar nodes may offer support for SA, WA and non-member participants in strategic research collaborations of interest to the node, e.g. the Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing (TPAC)/University of Tasmania (UTAS) node has offered to provide support for marine science researchers.

Other options for SA, WA and non-node researchers include:

• Apply for resources at their local institution.
• Apply for a merit based allocation at one of Australia’s national high-performance computing centres (Pawsey or the NCI), including the Nimbus cloud at Pawsey.
• Use a commercial cloud provider (the costs would need to be covered by the researcher).

Until additional cloud capacity is available, new allocation requests from non-node users that require significant resources (particularly cloud storage) will be challenging to support due to the shut down of the SA node and the withdrawal of the WA node.