SURF Research Cloud new features

November 2025

Claim workspace ownership

This is a feature that helps to address situations that can emerge during the lifecycle op a collaboration.

When the owner of a workspace should leave the collaboration, a member of the collaboration can become the new owner by claiming the ownership.

This is a workspace action that is only enabled for workspace admins of the collaboration.

October 2025

Optional Components

In a catalog item, components that are not essential for the very deployment of a workspace can be declared "optional".

The user who starts the workspace can select in the last step of the wizard if they want to include the optional component or not.

See also in our user documentation. 

September 2025

Workspace estimated price and consumption

On the extended view of a workspace tile you can now see the estimated price per day of the workspace.

Both the RCCS price in credits and the NWO price in core hours or GPU hours are given next to each other.

The owner of the workspace can also see the budget that the workspace has consumed (with a delay of max 48 hours).

Pin favourite wallet view

You can pin your preferred wallet plot to the main dashboard of the portal.

This way, you can check the state of your most important wallet at a glance.

Go to the portal's wallet tab and select a wallet. In the upper right of the graphic you want, click on the "Pin" icon.

This graphic will now be displayed in the upper right of the main dashboard, in the "Quick actions", replacing the"Request new Wallet" tile.

Ephemeral Storage (on HPC Cloud)

Ephermeral storage is very fast and is a great place to keep data caches.

On the high memory and GPU nodes of SURF's own HPC Cloud provider, ephemeral storage has been available for a time, already.

It was only not mounted, by default.

Any high memory or GPU workspace on HPC Cloud has the available ephemeral storage mounted by default, now.

• On Linux to "/mnt/scratch" and "~/scratch".

• On Windows to "D:\".

The size of the given ephemeral storage varies with the different size flavours and can be looked up on this page.

There is no extra charge for ephemeral storage. It is included in the price of the flavour.

November 2024

Reboot workspace

Workspace owners or workspace administrators can now reboot a workspace.

The difference with pause/resume is that the machine will not get undeployed and redeployed.

 The hardware that your workspace is running on is not released and remains available for your workspace.

GPU catalog items to CUDA version 12

Our CUDA component now installs CUDA Tools version 12.6 on GPU workspaces.

On Azure A10, the CUDA version is 12.4

October 2024

SRAM synchronization with SCIM

Collaborations, groups, and SSH public keys will be synchronized quicker upon change in SRAM.

This will result in a better user experience for new collaborations and changes to user profiles.

September 2024

Requestable catalog items

Sharing catalog items in a controlled way has been a bit tedious, in the past.

Now there is a clear protocol of offering, requesting and approving the use of catalog items.

Connecting Research Drive

We were able to simplify the connection setup for Research Drive.

Connect (other) WebDAV servers

It is just as easy to connect other WebDAV servers, now.

For instance SURFdrive.

API tokens

We have changed the way of obtaining an API token for our growing API functionality.

New Fat node flavors

We have rearranged the available high memory flavors.

Customize nginx location of Jupyter Notebooks service

The Jupyter component that is the base for most Jupyter catalog items has a parameter "jupyter_nginx_location", now.

It can be used to assign the Jupyter web service to a route other than "/". This way, it is easier to host other web services on the same workspace.

August 2024

SURF Research Cloud API

The SURF Research Cloud API is now available! This API allows you to interact programmatically with SURF Research Cloud.

You can create and use an API token to access the various endpoints of our SURF Research Cloud microservices.

Two Swagger pages are created for the microservices 'workspace server' and 'user server'. 

Note that these pages are continuously being updated to include more functionality. The API for the 'application server' and 'wallet server' microservices are under construction. 

read more

MATLAB catalog item

MATLAB is now available on SURF Research Cloud with a "bring your own license" model.

You need to have a valid license and log in with your MathWorks credentials to use it on our infrastructure.

MATLAB is offered as a MATLAB Integration for Jupyter Notebook, therefore we have written a tutorial on how to use it (the link below).

read more

Depleted wallet automation

If you run out of credits in your wallet all workspaces that were created with this wallet are paused automatically. You will be notified about this procedure in advance.

March 2024

Attach/Detach Volume (on an existing workspace)

Moving around persistent storage volumes between workspaces was tedious, before.

If your workspace is from March 2024 or later, you can just pause the workspace and manage the attached volumes in the "Storage" tab of the extended workspace display in the portal.

read more

Mount Storage Volumes by Name

Persistent storage volumes used to be mounted under ~/data/volume_<x>

The number "x" was randomly assigned so you had to guess which volume was which if you had more than one attached.

Now, by default, volumes are mounted by their given storage name.

If your catalog item still needs the legacy naming pattern of "volume_<x>", you can set a special parameter.

read more

Flexible Security Groups (open ports)

Opening ports required you to think ahead a lot, before creating the workspace.

Depending on the catalog item you use you can now add security group rules that will open specific ports or port ranges.

read more

Versioning in Component Creation

If you are maintaining a catalog item on Research Cloud, you want to make sure that it keeps working for your end users while you are working on improvements.

While the Ansible Playbooks, Docker files, or Powershell scripts can be version-controlled in git, the remainder of a component with all its fields was not versionable.

Now you can take your component through an actual Dev/Test/Production cycle, too.

read more

September 2023

Access Jupyter Notebooks with SRAM

If you start a Jupyter Notebook workspace using a SURF Research Cloud catalog item, you will log in to the workspace with SRAM.

This is the same mechanism that is used for logging in to the SURF Research Cloud portal.

Just select your institute (or EduID) and log in.

This feature is active after September 12th, 2023.

April 2023

New catalog creation flow

We have thoroughly redesigned the workflow of the catalog creation.

To begin with, "plugins" are now called "components" and "applications" are called "catalog items".

Both components and catalog items are now created and edited "wizard style".

"Application Offers" have disappeared from the user interface entirely.

The creation process should be a lot clearer now.

Please also refer to the updated documentation.

"CO first"

In the resource creation wizards for workspaces, storage, reserved IP addresses, and private networks you now select the collaboration (CO) first.

Wallet chart

On the "Wallet" tab of the portal, there are charts available to give you insight into your usage of the budget.

Extend the display tile of the wallet to see a chart for each budget that is funding your wallet.

Provisioning wallets per CO

We could speed up the process of issuing wallets for some situations. When your CO is prepared accordingly, you can choose if a new CO member should receive a wallet of an assigned budget. Please contact us via https://servicedesk.surf.nl if you are interested in using this feature.

Windows: Chrome and Edge

On Windows workspaces, the Chrome and Edge browsers are available now.

Chrome is the default browser.

February 2023

Jupyter Notebook workspaces by default offer a Python3 kernel to run notebooks with.

We have added an "example custom" kernel that also offers numpy, matplotlib, pandas, and scipy.

In the user's home directory there is a notebook "KERNEL-README.ipyn" that explains how to modify an existing kernel and how to create your own.

The plugin that is used to create a custom kernel can also be used with other Ubuntu-based apps in ResearchCloud. Not only Jupyter.

November 2022

Flavours are split into 'os' and 'size' part

Earlier, workspace flavours on Research Cloud defined

• OS-type (Ubuntu, CentOS, Windows, ...) and
• sizes (number of cores, RAM size, ...).

Now there are two separate types of flavours: "OS" and "size"

This makes catalog item creation and catalog choice easier.

The flavours for public clouds will also bear the cloud provider's native flavour name.

Admin only workspaces

You can create an application that only a collaboration's admin can log in to.

Overwriting the parameter "co_admin_user_only" with "true" sets a catalog item to admin-login only.

This means that only members of the collaboration group "src_co_admin" can log in to the workspace.

iRods storage connection integration

On the portal's profile tab, you can add your iRods information to any of your collaborations.

Your storage will be mounted and your iRods will be linked to the workspaces of the collaboration.

Please refer to this documentation page for details.

October 2022

"Basic Cluster" workspace

The basic cluster is a workspace that contains multiple VMs.

The number of worker VMs can be set by the user during the workspace creation in the workspace wizard.

Restricted Remote Desktop Protocol for Windows workspace

If you create a catalog item for Windows, you can enforce a stricter security policy for the RDP client.

By overwriting the parameter "co_rdp_secure" with "true" data transfer through the RDP connection is disabled.

Copy/paste and mounting local drives will not work anymore, though.

Catalog item access restriction

The choice in the catalog can be confined to explicitly whitelisted applications.

Collaboration administrators can place users in the collaboration group "src_no_ext_apps".

Members of this group can only start applications that have been allowed explicitly for this collaboration.

Plugin creation wizard

We wanted to make the creation of plugins more user-friendly.

So we now have a wizard-style workflow for creating new and editing existing plugins.

The changed user interface is documented here.

User notification for full system disk

When 80% of the system disk is full, an automatic warning mail is sent to the workspace owner. 

Budget warning for contract administrator

When 80% of a budget has been spent, an e-mail will be sent to the contract administrator.

The contract administrator is the person who is listed in our Central Budgeting and Accounting service for this contract.

Workspace owner e-mail available in workspace

Inside Research Cloud workspaces, an e-mail mechanism is used to send notification e-mails to the workspace owner.

This API is now also available for your plugins.

Please contact us if you want to use this feature in your plugins.