 Welcome to you all. This has been set up as a webinar technically, but actually we're supposed to be designed more as a Q&A session for everybody, so please do feel free at any point to just unmute your microphones and ask a question. Just very quickly, I'll go through the sort of high-level information around the call for proposals, and then we might just open it up and people can ask questions. So the key dates hopefully you've seen on the website. This is the first webinar, we're having another webinar in September. We hope to be able to address the questions which are on an FAQ form which is also accessible from the ARDC website. Address any of those in the next version of the RFP. We haven't had any questions so far which I think will affect the RFP itself. My colleague Paul Coddington is online as well and can correct me if I'm wrong there, but if you do have questions or you want some clarification then please let us know, send us through a request and we'll see if we can get the RFP changed. That second version will be released in a couple of weeks, and then we have another few weeks of consultation around the process with the actual RFP itself opening on the 24th of October. So we hope to have quite a short period for the RFP itself because we've had quite a long period to begin with in terms of socialising what the RFP says. If you could register your interest we changed that from a register of intent to a register of interest. There's absolutely no obligation for anyone to put in a proposal at all, but if you do register your interest then we're able to make sure that you do get the communications relevant to the RFP. Okay so in very high-level terms the Nectar Research Cloud is an infrastructure as a service cloud with various other bits on it, which has been provided by the Nectar project part of the Encriss program. A lot of that infrastructure is now reaching the end of its life and we were successful in getting some capital to maintain the capacity of parts of that cloud and so this process here is to make sure that we do in fact maintain that capacity. The implications are of course that it's Nectar equipment so it's not to set up new clouds, it's set up to refresh of the existing Nectar infrastructure so the capital needs to be part of that Nectar Federation. In addition it has to comply with the one-to-one co-investment principles which we've outlined in the proposal. Now in that we've described it there where we would provide for example 100% of the capital with the partner providing an operation commitment to make sure that that infrastructure remains available for three years. We can vary that so for example we have one or two partners who have in fact very recently invested in the capital themselves and it's the operation side which would be more appropriate for us to support them with there so we can blend that model a little bit but the intent is that the all of that infrastructure will become part of the Nectar Federation and it'll all become available for national merit allocation so the trick there really is to ask for what you need so you'd be able to locally define organisational requirements if you can define your local so I'm talking from the perspective of for example an institution if you can define your local compute requirement requesting that amount of capital for us with an operations commitment from your organisation obviously means that all of that infrastructure is being used for national merit allocation but you don't necessarily need to be supporting users outside your organisation. Alternatively for organisations who want to provide a broader spread provide the amount of the provider proposal which indicates the amount of capital which you're able and willing to support and around which you believe you can make a business model to support that operating model so we're quite flexible in that the original Nectar proposal resulted in a collection of organisations which we refer to as the nodes they're spread around Australia and we've had some amendments in that node community over the last few years this call is open to any organisation so either to partner with those nodes or if an organisation feels it's able to put up that infrastructure within the time period then they're more than welcome to put in a proposal also the proposals will close the 8th of November and we hope to have the results out to applicants by the 25th of November the contract the draft contract we're hoping to have through the new ARDC limited company rather than through a university which has been the historical method of doing the contracting those contracts aren't quite ready for circulation yet but you can see in the in the stub contract it has the general headings which the contracts will address and the details we'll hope to get that to people as quickly as possible and again that will just be shared on the website organisations are welcome to combine together so that applies both to our existing node community as well as new partners combine applications more than we can only contract with a single organisation so some structure needs to exist to make sure that we can contract with one entity through that but in terms of who's backing that entity more than happy for there to be a range of participants there I think there's a chat section here where people are welcome to put in some questions I might briefly hand over to my colleague Paul to see if I've missed anything or if there's anything extra he would like to add no I think that's that's pretty much covered it so I think we're really just looking for any questions that people might have around the RFP process all right so Paul and I are also available for anyone to communicate with any questions that are addressed to us we'll go up on the FAQ so while we won't be saying who asked the question just in terms of transparency we'll make sure that all of the questions do appear up there ask me anything yeah are you looking for any kind of domain focus from the submissions we're not specifically looking for a domain focus but we could imagine a domain focus would be one of the sort of organising constructs if you like for people to create that model around so the original applications in the first version of Nectar did have quite a strong domain focus in terms of what domain would your organisation be particularly targeting we have less of an emphasis on that for this round thanks I've warmed up someone else can fire a question now that would seem inappropriate for me not to ask a question hello and how are you Paul I wonder given that this is now going to what I would refer to as a retail model you're going to potentially open up to individual institutions and I do note my good friend Andrade here on the call how do you advise working with direct direct institution and what are the applications of any for the connection the cross connection with the New Zealand people please I might give that to Paul as we have already got a couple of for example Auckland which might be a way of addressing both of those at the same time yeah we're certainly not looking for applications for this funding round from New Zealand organisations but I think the the way we'd support them would be essentially the same as we're doing at the moment if the New Zealand organisations wish to federate into Nectar as they do now of what we allow that and if and we're trying to encourage you know trans-Tasman collaboration which we can do through through existing mechanisms of having projects that have New Zealand and Australian researchers part of them and sharing resources in that way but it's not expected that we would be taking an application from New Zealand organisations for for funding that's not allowed has to be for Australian organisation Hi Ian Paul it's Kieran here it says the intention of this to build buy and build infrastructure or is it also to think of more of the hybrid models of public cloud private cloud partnerships is that in your thinking as well or is that somewhere in the future so for this round the infrastructure needs to become part of the Nectar Federation so come into that same allocation and management model so that does make it difficult for a whole range of the hybrid models it's predominantly we envisage buy and build similar to the original implementation I mean it's probably possibly worth pointing out that you know we're certainly in the future interested in looking at commercial cloud and public cloud but that's not what this round is about anybody else we do have quite a lot of actually ARDC people on the call but if there are any non ARDC people who have no question I'll ask another one then what you mentioned that the when you're talking about applying for the amount of capacity and you also say you say it's national merit allocated but only apply for the amount that you you want yourself so is you suggesting that could be self assertion of national merit I mean how would how would if people apply for the amount of capacity they need themselves how do they ensure they get that capacity well they they can't there's no guarantee that anyone will get the capacity they asked for but nonetheless I think the so for example and organize an institution a university might say we need x amount of compute capacity could we please get that and we'll commit to operating that for our what essentially they're local users but which are still national merit awarded activities and so they fit within that guideline in other organizations which may span multiple organizations they could basically go through the same process and go to those member organizations and say well what do you envisage your demand being we'll apply for the aggregate of all of those demands and we'll create the business model around that that supports those and those members would in some form I guess provide that operating support there so it's really a question of and I mean equally an organization may say well we're not really sure how much we can support but we feel we can support multiple organizations across multiple domains we'd like to pitch for a certain amount of capacity which we will then try and expand the business in to fulfill and there if the organization has the operating model behind that that can support that and providing that infrastructure is being used for again that national merit activity then that's compatible with that model as well all right well that's all pretty quiet um if there aren't any other questions this mark do you have anything else no and you know I'm just trying to find a way to do this thing that's also so uh yeah my point being that to ask for the amount of capacity that someone thinks they need without being able to assure that capacity is uh is tricky if not impossible so I'm not quite sure how this works still anyway thank you okay do we have any other questions from anyone else on the call okay good like I said if you do have any questions that uh crop up then please feel free to give us a call um and also you can send in uh particular questions through the website otherwise I feel we may have covered all the ground that's useful just at the moment we will circulate the contracts as I said as soon as we've got the drafts uh we'll also be putting together um a little presentation to try and address some of the questions that mark's raising as in how does that actually work in terms of fully merit allocated uh commitment with an operations component for the home organization how do you get that to work uh in various different scenarios so we'll be putting that up fairly shortly as well if there are questions around the RFP itself what's involved what's in there what are the timelines when do things need to be made available then please do register them uh as part of the FAQ process uh and otherwise I think we might call that um a day okay thank you all very much