Available Resources

The Cloud

The Nectar Cloud supports thousands of virtual machines using 20,000 VCPUs across Australia.

Sharing it out (allocations)

The Nectar Cloud provides access to the cloud via projects, each with an allocation of time & capacity (virtual CPUs).

  • All researchers initially (and without application) get a personal project with 2 VCPUs for 3 Months.
  • This means you can run 2 Small or 1 Medium instance for three months.
  • Need more time or computing power? Submit an allocation request.
  • Multiple users can share an allocation a project.

Instances available by size

The resources available to an instance are selected by different 'flavors' when launching the instance for the first time.

The flavors define the number of VCPUs, the root disk size and the size of the ephemeral disk. The current flavors use a name pre-fixed with 'm2.'

  • m2.tiny: 1 VCPUs, 768MB RAM, 5GB root disk, no ephemeral disk
  • m2.xsmall: 1 VCPUs, 2GB RAM, 10GB root disk, no ephemeral disk
  • m2.small: 1 VCPUs, 4GB RAM, 30GB root disk, no ephemeral disk
  • m2.medium: 2 VCPUs, 6GB RAM, 30GB root disk, no ephemeral disk
  • m2.large: 4 core, 12GB RAM, 30GB root disk, 80GB ephemeral disk
  • m2.xlarge: 12 core, 48GB RAM, 30GB root disk, 360GB ephemeral disk

Legacy flavors use a prefix of 'm1.' and have a smaller root disk.

  • m1.small: 1 core, 4GB RAM, 10GB root disk, 30GB secondary disk
  • m1.medium: 2 cores, 8GB RAM, 10GB root disk, 60GB secondary disk
  • m1.large: 4 cores, 16GB RAM, 10GB root disk, 120GB secondary disk
  • m1.xlarge: 8 cores, 32GB RAM, 10GB root disk, 240GB secondary disk
  • m1.xxlarge: 16 cores, 64GB RAM, 10GB root disk, 480GB secondary disk

Larger instances require more resources than available in the personal project; a new project with more resources can be requested via an allocation request.

Internet Traffic Quotas (downloads to your instances)