The New England Research Cloud (NERC) is now available!

The MOC Alliance, housed at Boston University, is pleased to announce that the New England Research Cloud (NERC) is now generally available for research and education users. NERC is a production cloud, operated by BU and Harvard Research IT, that supports VMs, containers, S3 storage, and an AI as a service platform. NERC has recently added 80 more servers to the service, enabling it to support many more users than they have today, and have racked/networked (>500) additional servers that will be integrated as demand warrants. While GPUs are currently limited, an agreement with Lenovo will make available 64 NVIDIA A100 GPUs (in 16 liquid cooled servers) by the end of December 2023. NERC charges users rates sufficient to cover costs and enable the cloud to grow.  These rates (see here) are today between 1/3 and ½ of the public cloud, the project does not charge any egress costs, and we expect rates to drop dramatically as the effort scales.  

If you are interested, you can find information on onboarding and documentation to use the service here, and an evolving web page of tutorials, use cases, and demonstrations of using the service here. To let people kick the tires, we are offering one month of free service (or $1,000, whichever comes first). Also, BU Research IT is offering a $100 per month subsidy for BU faculty. (We hope other participating universities will soon offer the same.)