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Getting access to an existing Nectar project

Getting access to an existing Nectar project

Owned by Sara Ogston
Last updated: Mar 19, 2025 by Lauren

eIntroduction

There are a lot of similarities between the Melbourne Research Cloud’s ‘MRC IaaS’ product and the Nectar Research Cloud (simply called Nectar):

  • The MRC IaaS product grew out of Nectar, and they still share some infrastructure. For example, MRC IaaS relies on Nectar for authentication.

  • They are also both Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS) offerings. IaaS generally refers to offering virtualised compute, networking, and storage.

So, if you were already familiar with how to manage a project and its resources on Nectar, you will feel immediately at home with MRC IaaS.

The difference between them is that MRC IaaS is specifically optimised for the needs of University of Melbourne researchers:

  • All MRC IaaS projects are given access to Windows images.

  • All MRC IaaS projects are given access to custom "flavors" which grant more memory per core when launching a virtual machine.

  • The MRC Dashboard removes features which are known to be buggy.

  • The MRC Dashboard support system is integrated with the University of Melbourne's ServiceNow help desk.

  • The MRC runs on hardware specially chosen and purchased by the University of Melbourne to offer an immense amount of computational power.

  • The MRC runs completely out of our very own Queensberry Hall Data Centre.

  • The MRC is engineered and supported by your fellow University of Melbourne staff, some of whom have previously been University of Melbourne researchers.

The decision is made on a project-by-project basis. It depends on factors such as how is the project funded, who is it supporting, and who is the Chief Investigator.

Some users will need to use Nectar for some projects, and MRC IaaS for others.

If your project is funded by a national grant such as ARC or NHMRC, then you should request a project on Nectar first. This is regardless of project leadership or membership. A project consisting entirely of University of Melbourne researchers may still be required to operate as a National Merit project on Nectar, if the project has national funding sources.

Whereas, if you don't have any real grants, or all your funding sources are local, and if everyone in the project is based at University of Melbourne, then you should definitely request an MRC IaaS project if you think we can support your research. To do this, please see our guide on Managing Allocation Requests.

If you have a case that seems ambiguous, please contact us and we'll help you to figure out what should be done.

Getting access to an existing Nectar Project

For the most part, we have already identified and imported all the projects from Nectar which we think are eligible and would benefit from MRC resources.

If you think your project has been overlooked, or if you are no longer eligible to use Nectar (e.g. because your project lost National Merit status), we encourage you to request conversion by contacting us.

Make sure to let us know the name of the project you want us to review for importing. To support your request, please provide full reasoning and information.

While waiting for the request to be reviewed, you can continue to use the Nectar dashboard.

Transferring resources from other Nectar Nodes to the Melbourne Research Cloud

It is possible to import a project from Nectar to the Melbourne Research Cloud while that project is still using resources at other nodes. However, once your project is imported in this way, you will be required to migrate those resources at other nodes to the MRC.

We have a guide which walks you through how to do this task.