Dr Joseph Anthony, cloud services manager at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), shown with some of the hardware already delivered for the NeCTAR could. “The distinguishing and innovative characteristics of the NCI node are the use of floating-point optimised Intel CPUs, high performance Intel SSDs for demanding high-IOPS science workloads and a fat-tree 56 Gbps Mellanox Ethernet interconnect – all of which are not the main stay of commercial or academic cloud offerings,” he said. (Photo by Paul Kuske)