The National Research Platform (NRP) is a free, community-governed, distributed research computing infrastructure funded primarily by the National Science Foundation (NSF). NRP consists of sites located all around the world and has a large diverse pool of hardware. NRP is available to researchers for free through their academic institution.
The official instructions to get started with NRP are here: NRP Documentation
You will need to:
- Visit the NRP Portal
- Click Login in the top right
- You will be redirected to CILogin where you will be given a list of institutions. Choose Iowa State University from the list.
- After successful authentication your account will be created
Nautilus (which is the name of the cluster) is a Kubernetes cluster. You won't be able to do anything until you have access to a namespace. Namespaces are allocated to faculty, staff or postdocs. Students will need to have their advisor make a request on their behalf for a namespace.
The request form for a namespace can be found here: Namespace form
NRP offers numerous services within the cluster. A view of available services and their status can be checked here.
There are three primary ways to interact with Nautilus: JupyterHub, Coder, and Kubernetes. The NRP website has numerous tutorials available to assist new users with getting started with Nautilus. These can be found: Using Nautilus