Cloud resources available to Australian Researchers and specifically Griffith researchers are outlined here. Many cloud resources are available to Griffith researchers through offerings from Griffith partners. For example, QCIF offers QRIScloud (Virtual machine servers and huge amount storage for collections) through its partnership with NeCTAR and RdSI.

Dr. Nick Tate (RdSI) announced at the eResearch Australia Conference (Oct 21st-23rd) in Brisbane that an agreement has been reached with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to allow Australian researchers to log in with their AAF credentials to the Amazon cloud. Once the technical challenges of authentication have been worked out, it will allow Griffith researchers access to the vast amount of resources on the amazon cloud with a single sign on with their Griffith Credentials.

By December 2013, QRIScloud will provide:
4,400+ cores as part of the national NeCTAR cloud (sum of stages 1 + 2)
Increased RDSI storage up to 1.5 PB (with more on the way)

In early 2014, QCIF members will be able to access Virtual Machines (VMs) through specialised server types :
4 servers with large memory (1 TB) – to get round the current VM limitation of 256GB of memory
2 GPU servers (GPU computation in the cloud)
2 high I/O servers (very high throughput)

This will complement existing university and government investments in specialised High Performance Computation.

QRIScloud Stage 2 will deliver a 40 Gigabit network backbone connecting individual compute servers at 20 Gigabit (2x10GbE). This will connect to a high bandwidth AARNet service to the Internet and to all RDSI Nodes.
In combination with high-speed file transfer software (ASPERA and GridFTP), bandwidth speeds will be 100 to 1,000 times faster than a typical NBN connection.

Update: Feb 2015:

Upgraded QRIScloud data storage now available

Over the Christmas break QCIF completed the planned major upgrade to the QRIScloud storage facilities in Brisbane. The new capacity has been placed into production usage from early January and is delivering excellent performance. Please make applications for space to store your data and data collections through your local eResearch Analyst.

The additional capacity brings the total active available storage in Brisbane to
6 petabytes of disk and
10 petabytes in a disk/tape hierarchical storage management (HSM) system.
A replication subsystem automatically copies all active data onto a further 30 petabytes of background tape storage ensuring that user data is protected against data loss.

Brisbane data storage is hosted in the commercial data centre at Polaris, one of Australia’s leading highly secure, purpose-built, Tier 3 data centres providing excellent levels of data centre service. This includes extensive redundancy in power and other services, and geographically diverse high-speed network connections to university campuses and research institutions.

The new QRIScloud storage complements the 2.1 petabytes of disk storage already available in Townsville. Townsville data is replicated to Brisbane on an as needs basis pending upcoming upgrades to the network capacity between Brisbane and Townsville.

This QRIScloud data storage and access facility already holds about 2.5 petabytes of research collection data stored by Queensland researchers, providing an invaluable asset to research.

Looking after your cloud data and compute

The new Brisbane storage capacity has allowed QCIF to move all user virtual machines and storage services off the initial QRIScloud data centre in St Lucia and over to the main Polaris centre. This has been accomplished without any known disruption to user services – congratulations to the QRIScloud team who worked right through the holiday period to make sure this was completed by early February.
The equipment that was operating at St Lucia will now be transferred to Polaris to become part of the main QRIScloud facility.

St Lucia will continue to host offsite tape replication services for QRIScloud, insuring our users against the very low possibility of failures at the Polaris centre. The St Lucia tape storage silo was upgraded at the end of 2014 to be able to handle the additional QRIScloud transaction and storage volumes.

Large Memory Virtual Machines

QRIScloud compute cloud now offers virtual machines with up to 1 terabyte of memory. To obtain further information about large memory services, please contact QRIScloud Support support@qriscloud.org.au

Guaranteed Access to 16-core Virtual Machines

To offset recent difficulties with allocations for 16-core virtual machines through the NeCTAR Research Cloud, QRIScloud has released limited regional 16-core virtual machine allocations. You can apply for guaranteed access to 16-core virtual machines for an agreed period through QRIScloud Support support@qriscloud.org.au.

Introduction

Some of the advantages of Cloud Resources include:
1. Huge amount of storage for your research data collections are available at no cost rdsi storage.It is anticipated that by March 2014, QCIF will have up to 2.5 PetaBytes of storage resources.
2. With Cloud resources, a dedicated storage and computing resource is always available to the exclusive use of the research group.
3. Collaborator accounts can be created almost instantaneously. To use University resources, collaborators will need to get in-house accounts. Depending on the university, it can take significant time to create an account on a university system.
4. Direct access to the cloud resource, instead of institutional VPN access. For example, your QRIScloud storage can be mapped to your workstation with the click of a button.
5. Researchers have full control of their resources. Researchers have Administrator rights on their cloud resource which means software installation and maintenance can be done by researchers and do not have to wait for external system administrators to schedule a downtime to do maintenance.
6. It is free (currently) for all Griffith staff. No charges for the infrastructure
7. No charges for data transfer at the cloud end.

QCIF Cloud Resources

NeCTAR Virtual Machines

https://confluence.rcs.griffith.edu.au/display/GHPC/NeCTAR+Cloud

RdSI Storage

Huge amount of storage is available on request. Please contact Griffith's QCIF eresearch Analyst for more information.

National Computing Resources

NCI

The Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF) has resources on the National Computational Infrastructure (3 million compute hours) for 2013 specifically for grants to Queensland researchers. For information on the computing and software capabilities please see - http://nf.nci.org.au/
.
QCIF is looking to allocate these resources and will take requests in each quarter to allocate the resources for the rest of the year. The QCIF allocation is well suited for new users that do not want to wait until the usual NCI round and/or those who want to demonstrate they have the capability to use the NCI effectively. QCIF does require that QCIF share grant holders apply for a normal NCMAS share in the following rounds but will again consider the application if it was unsuccessful. The hyperlink, http://www.qcif.edu.au/about-us/get-an-account, shows the process including a howto. Small grants (less than 20,000 compute hours) a year need to provide less information to make the application easier.

Interested applicants can contact Marcus Fitzpatrick (Griffith QCIF eResearch Analyst) or QCIF rep. Marlies Hankel (m.hankelATuq.edu.au ) for assistance with the applications and the yearly NCI merit allocation scheme.

Project allocations are usually done on a quarter basis and are on a "use it or lose it" basis. 

To get access please follow the instructions here:
http://nci.org.au/access/user-registration/new-project-application/

You will need to get a new user account fist as specified on the page. When you apply for a project please select
to propose a new project and select QCIF as the funding body. You will need to write a project proposal and request computational time per quarter. 

You may contact Marlies Hankel m.hankelATuq.edu.au if you have any questions.

IVEC

http://www.ivec.org/applications-open-for-national-computational-merit-allocation-scheme-ncmas/

http://www.ivec.org/ivec-call-geosciences-merit-allocation-scheme/

Contact:
Chris Harris <chris.harris@ivec.org>
George Beckett <george.beckett@ivec.org>

Acknowledgement

All research projects done using QCIF resources should be cited as:

"This research/project has been undertaken with the aid of the research cloud resources provided by the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF)."