Overview of Nero Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

General

Nero GCP is a shared Big Data Computing Platform specifically designed for High Risk Data, developed in collaboration with the School of Medicine (SOM) and Stanford Research Computing.

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

Cost for using Nero GCP

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

Stanford has negotiated discounts from the published Google Cloud Platform rates; while the rates vary between services, PIs can expect a discount of at least 18%.

We suggest using Google’s price calculator to provide specific cost estimates related to your Nero GCP usage. The price calculator does not include Stanford’s discounts in its estimates.

Here is some rough pricing information, without discounts:

• 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 : ~$290/month.
  • 30GB of RAM, 100GB of Disk, 8vCPU’s, Pytorch , 1 T4 GPU : ~$550/month.

Ingress and egress fees are waived for Nero GCP.

Authorized members of a team can view their Nero GCP project billing status via the Google Cloud Console.

Prerequisites to Getting Started

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

Connecting to Nero GCP

You should receive a welcome email with details once your Nero GCP project has been created and is ready to use.

Follow these connection instructions to get started.

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