Network and Core
Two layers of shared computing serve Nexus Consortiums. The Nexus Network is a durable federation of retained national and regional sites. Nexus Core is the temporary technical backbone assembled each year for the annual programme from contributed, authorized computing, networks and teams, then stood down. The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI) coordinates both through GCRI Canada. This page explains the difference, the states a resource offer passes through and the rules for describing capacity honestly. Return to Nexus Ecosystem.
- Institution
- The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI)
- Service level
- R0: information and enquiries
Country programme console
Network and Core · Country programme A · Month 4
Programme
- Formationdossier
- National Deskstaffed
- National Modelbuild
- Portfoliooptions
- Annual missiontest
- Reportedition
System coupling
dependency strength, 0 to 100
Placeholder strengths a National Model replaces with estimates.
Evidence ledger
| Reservoir storage | OBSERVED | National Desk |
| Hydropower output | MODELLED | Technical office |
| Grid stress | SCENARIO | Technical office |
| Hospital continuity | ESTIMATED | Health ministry |
GCRI · Country programme consoleCountry programme console, in outline: domain structure with placeholder names and illustrative values, not a record.
The short answer.
The Nexus Network and Nexus Core are the two layers of shared computing for Nexus Consortiums: the Network is a durable federation of retained national and regional sites, and the Core is a temporary backbone assembled each year from contributed, authorized resources, then stood down. A contributed resource moves through seven states, and an offer is never counted as capacity.
Landscapes and remoteness in Central America.
Mountain ranges, deserts, wetlands, glaciers and reefs, and how remote each division is from large cities, shown for Central America as an example geography for this subject.
Persistent, temporary and durable.
| Layer | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Persistent coordination | Authorized institutions and projects; resource catalogues and qualification; identity, rights and methods; retained evidence and publication records |
| Temporary technical environment | Qualified networking and high-performance computing; accelerators, cloud and edge capacity; secure data spaces and cyber ranges; simulation environments and technical support |
| Durable outputs | Trained teams and tested configurations; reproducible workloads and software; datasets where permitted and evaluation results; improvements to institutional practice |
The Network is not a permanent global supercomputer, and the Core is not installed, standing capacity.
Seven states, none of which implies the next.
A contributed resource moves through offered, qualified, reserved, allocated, accessible, measured and accepted. An offer is never counted as reserved, consumed or funded, and neither membership nor sponsorship secures an allocation.
- Owner and operating contact
- Legal and use constraints, location and availability window
- Hardware, software, interconnect, memory and storage profile
- Security state, supported workloads and measured limits
- Return and sanitisation requirements
Rules for describing capacity.
- 01
State the conditions
Publish measured capability with workload, data size, hardware, topology, precision, concurrency, software version and interval.
- 02
Separate the numbers
Keep peak, sustained, available and allocated capacity apart, and never sum hardware specifications into a performance claim.
- 03
Federation is not one machine
Describe local low-latency computing and wide-area federation separately.
- 04
Count the footprint
Track energy, cooling, water, transfers and logistics, keeping measurements apart from estimates.
Terms used on this page.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Edge computing | Processing data close to where it is produced or used rather than in a central data centre. |
| Data residency | A requirement that data be stored and processed within a stated jurisdiction. |
| Research and education network | A network that connects universities and research institutions at high capacity. |
| Capability computing | Using a large share of a supercomputer for a single, very large job. |
How the temporary Core is closed.
The proposed one-day stand-down closes new submissions, checkpoints authorized jobs, freezes the evidence manifest, revokes temporary credentials, reconciles equipment and records unresolved exceptions. It becomes a programme commitment only when the annual programme records it, and review, reconciliation and corrections continue afterwards. Contributors can start from Technology and infrastructure providers; the annual programme itself is governed by The Global Risks Forum (GRF), described on Annual operating cycle.
Questions and answers.
Is any Core capacity available now?
Does offering capacity give us a role in the programme?
Is data deleted within a day of stand-down?
Around GCRI.
Start with an enquiry.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.