Research virtual machines

Rather than running on a desktop or laptop computer, a virtual machine is a computer system you access remotely.

Within a research context, virtual machines provide a separate computing environment that can be used to speed up analyses, facilitate innovative methods, support long-running tasks, collaborate with others, or free up your desktop or laptop to do other activities.

• Access to more compute power (CPUs and RAM - hardware) than is available in a desktop or laptop.
• Compute power can be increased to meet your needs.
• Test your workflow ahead of submitting a job to a High Performance Computing (HPC) platform.
• Provides secure, collaborative access to software and data.
• Access to Windows and Linux operating systems.

• Compute power is finite, and specific performance levels cannot be guaranteed.

The University of Auckland provides access to several different virtual machine services:

• Managed virtual machines
• Nectar virtual desktop
• Nectar self-service virtual machines
• Secure Research Environment (SRE)
  

The University also facilitates access to the REANNZ High Performance Computing (HPC) platform, which provides specialised high-performance hardware to enable concurrent execution (parallelism) of multiple tasks.

For a comparison of services, see Choosing research compute.

Research Virtual Machines Support Services
Email: research-vm@auckland.ac.nz

Sean Matheny
Senior Platforms & Services Engineer
Email: s.matheny@auckland.ac.nz