General

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is the first cloud offering for the Nero platform.

In addition to tools like Slurm and Jupyter, Nero GCP researchers can additionally access HIPAA compliant cloud native products such as BigQuery, Dataflow, Pub/Sub etc.

Make sure to check our Nero GCP cheat sheet

Cost for using Nero GCP

Cloud infrastructure costs are passed through to faculty via PTA# to cover the explicit GCP costs.

You can view your Nero GCP project billing status via the Google Cloud Console.

While Google’s price calculator may provide more specific cost estimates related to your Nero GCP usage, here are some average estimates that may be helpful:

  • Google Cloud Storage: ~ $20/month/TB
  • BigQuery: ~$25/month/TB for storage and $5/TB traversed for query
  • Compute instance:
    • 30GB of RAM, 100GB of Disk, 8vCPU’s, Python & R : ~$100/month.
    • 30GB of RAM, 100GB of Disk, 8vCPU’s, Pytorch , 1 T4 GPU : $ 281.54/month.

Additional Stanford discounts (up to 18%) have not been applied to these estimates.

Prerequisites to Getting Started

Please complete the User Prerequisites before requesting a Nero Google Cloud Project.

Connecting to Nero GCP Shared Cluster

You should receive a welcome email with details once your Nero GCP project has been created and is ready to use. If a multi-user cluster was requested and deployed in the project you have access to:

  1. Connect to the Full-Tunnel Stanford VPN (available at vpn.stanford.edu)
  2. Using an ssh client, ssh to your GCP project using the following command, where <sunetid> should be replaced by your actual SUNet ID, and <pi-sunetid> should be replaced by your pi’s SUNet ID.
$ ssh <sunetid>@<pi-sunetid>.compute.stanford.edu

Connecting to Nero GCP Standalone Instance (Vertex AI)

  1. Connect to the Full-Tunnel Stanford VPN (available at vpn.stanford.edu)
  2. Download and install Google Cloud SDK tools (available at [https://cloud.google.com/sdk/docs/install])
  3. In the GCP console, navigate to ‘view gcloud command’ in the SSH dropdown on the Compute Engine » VM instances page. For example gcloud compute ssh –zone “us-west1-b” “your-instance-name-here” –project “your-nero-gcp-project-name-here”
  4. Instance must turned on and running to connect and should be turned off to save on cost when not being used.

Using Nero GCP

Nero GCP adheres to the Information Security Office’ Minsec Requirements due to its high-risk approved status.

Various restrictions apply, most notably:

* No root access
* Network access restricted

Installing Additional Software

Our most common software offering includes Slurm and Jupyter, on request.

If other software is needed for your Nero GCP project, please contact us.