NCI is proud to announce the Nirin cloud computing platform enabling interactive workflows, data analysis capabilities and research community support. Nirin is tightly integrated with NCI’s existing Gadi supercomputer and multi-Petabyte research data collections.
NCI’s newest cloud platform is called Nirin, meaning ‘edge’ in the language of the Wiradjuri people. Selected in consultation with local Ngunnawal and Wiradjuri Elder Aunty Matilda House, the name Nirin reflects the cloud’s role as one of the computational capabilities at NCI directly accessible to users.
Available to existing NCI users with current compute allocations, Nirin integrates with the Gadi supercomputer and the global filesystems, supporting those aspects of research computing more suited for a rapid-response environment. This distribution of workloads allows for the most productive uses of NCI’s varied infrastructure platforms.
Nirin is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform which supports NCI and our stakeholders with a dynamic compute and storage environment which can scale up and down as needed. It currently provides the foundation for many of NCI’s interactive data analysis environments and Virtual Laboratories and is used extensively for the processing and preparation of data used on Gadi. It is also used internally as part of NCI’s data publishing and data management environments.
(Canberra-based Indigenous artist)
Commissioned for the introduction of NCI's latest cloud computing system, this artwork shows lines of communication, meeting at gathering places represented by the circular features.
The arch shapes represent scientific communities researching in the Nirin cloud surrounded by data.
Nirin boasts a novel architecture in which elements of NCI’s previous Raijin supercomputer were repurposed to provide a massive new capability. Using the flexibility provided by the OpenStack cloud management framework, NCI provides scalable resources to data-intensive research workloads. This lets the Nirin cloud optimise the number of physical servers required at any time, reducing its energy consumption in quiet times and easily ramping up when demand increases.
NCI Director Professor Sean Smith said, “The Nirin cloud supports flexible and exciting data analysis workflows and interactive computing tasks. We are pleased to be able to offer Australia’s leading researchers more options for their computational and data science projects.”
The Nirin Cloud offers a range of compute, memory and storage capabilities suited to a variety of research workflows. Connected to NCI’s global filesystems and their repository of more than 15 Petabytes of nationally significant research data collections, Nirin allows researchers to combine their cloud computing with high-performance computing on Gadi, selecting the most appropriate compute tool for their particular needs.
Users wishing to access the Nirin cloud can view all the User Guides for accessing and setting up a cloud environment at NCI’s documentation portal, Opus.nci.org.au.
About the Nirin Cloud:
- 1856 Intel Broadwell cores with 22TB memory in a high-availability zone
- 16,640 Intel Sandy Bridge cores with 32 TB memory and 40 NVIDIA K80 GPUs in a high-capacity zone
- 6 PB High-speed Ceph storage
