SURF

surf.nl · Compute, Storage · 3 records · JSON

SURF Research Drive (Netherlands) — up to 5 TB free via NWO-funded Small Compute applications Storagecaveatinstitutionno cardR
SURF Computefails: identityinstitutionno cardDwrite-gated
surf spider / data archive as a free self-service tier Storagefails: quotaemail?card?R

SURF Research Drive (Netherlands) — up to 5 TB free via NWO-funded Small Compute applications Storage

caveatinstitutionno cardR

www.surf.nl/en/services/storage-data-management/research-dri · academic · storage/surf-research-drive-up-to-5-tb-free-via-nwo-funded-small · JSON · compare

Free tier	Community Edition: 'Are you working at an institution without its own Research Drive environment? Then apply for access to Research Drive Community Edition here. You will receive up to 5 TB of storage space.' Institutional instances have their own (much larger) quotas set per institution. unit TB; metered on stored-bytes
Price	none stated
Per-object cap	not stated
Retention	not stated
Egress	Unmetered — SURF is the Dutch national e-infrastructure, no egress product exists.
Identity	institution derived from the record's prose, not from an identity field, and no signup was executed: Community Edition: 'Are you working at an institution without its own Research Drive environment? Then apply for access to Research Drive Community Edition here. You will re
Binding	none no constraint in the record binds at this scale; the record carries no limit of a kind the vocabulary names
Interface	s3, webdav, rclone webdav
Tooling	Research Drive is ownCloud/Nextcloud-based, so the standard desktop sync client and WebDAV endpoints work; rclone's webdav backend applies. Not S3.
Composes with	5 TB per project via Small Compute, and the same application also unlocks 'max. 10TB project space storage' on Snellius, 'up to 200TB disk storage, 300TB tape storage' on Grid/Spider for data processing, and 'max. 50TB offline tape storage' — one NWO-funded application can therefore land 200+ TB of storage plus 5 TB of Research Drive. That is the single best storage-per-application ratio I found.
Reliability	servicedesk.surf.nl returns 401 to the reader and www.surf.nl intermittently 504s; the numbers here come from the live NWO page and a 2026-03-11 Wayback capture of the Research Drive page.
Notes	Community Edition: 'Are you working at an institution without its own Research Drive environment? Then apply for access to Research Drive Community Edition here. You will receive up to 5 TB of storage space.' Institutional instances have their own (much larger) quotas set per institution.
Evidence rung	reported One page read moves it to documented.
Checked	2026-10-21 (inherited); stale on 2026-11-04

Evidence (3)

date	source	what it proved
2026-10-21	www.surf.nl/en/small-compute-applications-nwo	'Research Drive - via SURF max. 5TB or via institution', 'max. 50TB offline tape storage, if required max. 10TB project space storage', 'up to 200TB disk storage, 300TB tape storage', 'tenured appointment ... or a tenure track appointment'
2026-10-21	www.surf.nl/en/services/storage-data-management/research-dri	captured 2026-03-11: 'Then apply for access to Research Drive Community Edition here. You will receive up to 5 TB of storage space.'
2026-10-21	servicedesk.surf.nl/wiki/spaces/WIKI/pages/117178927/RD+Gett	probe: read on -> 401 (authenticated wiki)

Unknown or withheld values (5)

$.free_tier.notes process
$.per_object_cap.notes not-extracted
$.per_object_cap.stated not-extracted
$.retention.notes not-extracted
$.retention.stated not-extracted

SURF Compute

fails: identityinstitutionno cardDwrite-gated

www.surf.nl/en/small-compute-applications-nwo · national HPC allocation · compute/surf · JSON · compare

Free tier	A Small Compute application can request "up to and including 1,000,000 CPU or GPU SBU (standard billing units) of cluster computing on Snellius Supercomputer", "Up to and including 500,000 CPU core-hours and/or 14,000 GPU hours of cluster computing on the LUMI pre-exascale supercomputer", "up to and including 1,000,000 CPU core hours or 10,000 GPU hours of Data Processing on Grid and/or Spider", and "up to and including 50,000 CPU core hours or 5,000 GPU hours of cloud computing on HPC Cloud via SURF Research Cloud", with a maximum duration of one year. unit hours; metered on wall-clock; continuous-small-allocation
Price	none stated
Per-object cap	not applicable
Retention	not applicable
Egress	not stated
Identity	institution not published
Limits	write-gated Eligibility is a tenured or tenure-track appointment at a Dutch university, university of applied sciences, university medical centre, KNAW or NWO institute, and a temporary appointment qualifies only if the employer guarantees the project's completion, so the 14,000 LUMI GPU-hours are unreachable without a Dutch contract. source Eligibility is a tenured or tenure-track appointment at a Dutch university, university of applied sciences, university medical centre, KNAW or NWO institute, and a temporary appointment qualifies only if the employer guarantees the project's completion, so the 14,000 LUMI GPU-hours are unreachable without a Dutch contract.
Binding	write-gated Eligibility is a tenured or tenure-track appointment at a Dutch university, university of applied sciences, university medical centre, KNAW or NWO institute, and a temporary appointment qualifies only if the employer guarantees the project's completion, so the 14,000 LUMI GPU-hours are unreachable without a Dutch contract.
Interface	unknown inferred from the tooling the provider documents; not probed
Tooling	not stated
Composes with	This is the largest set of numbers in the file reachable without a competitive review: 14,000 LUMI GPU-hours plus 500,000 LUMI core-hours plus a million SBU on Snellius, decided on technical feasibility in about two weeks. It composes badly with nothing except the Dutch contract, which is the whole gate.
Reliability	no reliability event recorded
Notes	Two properties make this the most interesting refutation. The review is not a merit panel but a feasibility check, so the allocation is closer to an administrative entitlement than to INCITE or EuroHPC; and the LUMI portion is a second, separate door into a machine the corpus already records under lumi.json as requiring a consortium country's Resource Allocator, which is a different and slower route than NWO Small Compute. The corpus holds no SURF or NWO record. SBU on Snellius is a billing unit whose ratio to core-hours the page does not state, so the Snellius figure is left as SBU rather than converted.
Evidence rung	documented
Checked	2026-10-22 (live); stale on 2026-11-21

Evidence (5)

date	source	what it proved
2026-10-22	www.surf.nl/en/small-compute-applications-nwo	up to 1,000,000 CPU or GPU SBU on Snellius; up to 500,000 CPU core-hours and/or 14,000 GPU hours on LUMI; up to 1,000,000 CPU core hours or 10,000 GPU hours of data processing; up to 50,000 CPU core hours or 5,000 GPU hours of HPC Cloud, quoted
2026-10-22	www.surf.nl/en/small-compute-applications-nwo	"researchers must have either a tenured appointment [...] or a tenure track appointment at one of the research organisations listed below"; for small applications a temporary appointment qualifies only if the organisation "guarantees the computing time project's duration and completion", quoted
2026-10-22	servicedesk.surf.nl/wiki/spaces/WIKI/pages/30660190/Obtainin	"Affiliates of one of the Dutch Universities or Grand Technology Institutes can submit an application for compute resources through NWO", quoted
2026-10-22	www.nwo.nl/en/calls/computing-time-on-national-computing-fac	"A researcher may submit a maximum of one computing time application per compute facility per calendar year directly to SURF"; maximum duration one year, quoted
2026-10-22	servicedesk.surf.nl/wiki/display/WIKI/Small+Compute+applicat	"These requests will only be assessed on technical feasibility by SURF and are usually handled within 2 weeks", quoted

More fields (1)

{
 "wave2": {
  "class": "national-hpc",
  "free_tier_kind": "continuous-small-allocation",
  "shape": {
   "vcpu": null,
   "ram_gib": null,
   "gpu_class": "AMD MI250X (LUMI-G)",
   "gpu_count": null
  }
 }
}

Unknown or withheld values (10)

$.egress.metered egress-unknown
$.egress.terms not-stated
$.identity_cost.detail process
$.interface interface-unknown
$.per_object_cap.notes process
$.per_object_cap.stated not-applicable
$.reliability_note none-observed
$.retention.notes process
$.retention.stated not-applicable
$.tooling not-stated

surf spider / data archive as a free self-service tier Storage

fails: quotaemail?card?R

servicedesk.surf.nl/wiki/spaces/WIKI/pages/117178927/RD+Gett · rejected-provider · storage/surf-spider-data-archive-as-a-free-self-service-tier · JSON · compare

Free tier	Tape archive access is requested through SURF's servicedesk and is institution- and application-gated (the free route is the NWO Small Compute application, which caps at 300 TB tape but requ unit none; metered on none
Price	none stated
Per-object cap	not recorded
Retention	not recorded
Egress	not recorded
Identity	email (placeholder) not published
Binding	none no constraint of a named kind was recorded; the verdict rests on the quota sentence rather than on a named limit
Interface	unknown
Tooling	not recorded
Composes with	not recorded
Reliability	Tape archive access is requested through SURF's servicedesk and is institution- and application-gated (the free route is the NWO Small Compute application, which caps at 300 TB tape but requ
Notes	Tape archive access is requested through SURF's servicedesk and is institution- and application-gated (the free route is the NWO Small Compute application, which caps at 300 TB tape but requ
Evidence rung	reported
Checked	2026-10-21 (inherited); stale on 2026-11-04

Evidence (2)

date	source	what it proved
2026-10-21	servicedesk.surf.nl/wiki/spaces/WIKI/pages/117178927/RD+Gett	Tape archive access is requested through SURF's servicedesk and is institution- and application-gated (the free route is the NWO Small Compute application, which caps at 300 TB tape but requ
2026-10-21	www.surf.nl/en/small-compute-applications-nwo	cited as the basis of the rejection: Tape archive access is requested through SURF's servicedesk and is institution- and application-gated (the free route is the NWO Small Compute application, which caps at 300 TB tape but requ

More fields (1)

{
 "dead_end": {
  "failure_class": "not-storage",
  "why": "Tape archive access is requested through SURF's servicedesk and is institution- and application-gated (the free route is the NWO Small Compute application, which caps at 300 TB tape but requ",
  "retry_when": "never; it is not storage",
  "first_recorded": "2026-10-21"
 }
}

Unknown or withheld values (14)

$.chaining not-recorded
$.confidence_note withheld
$.egress.terms not-recorded
$.free_tier.notes process
$.identity_cost.detail defaulted
$.identity_cost.kind identity-defaulted
$.interface interface-unknown
$.interface_detail withheld
$.limits_note process
$.per_object_cap.notes not-recorded
$.per_object_cap.stated not-recorded
$.retention.notes process
$.retention.stated not-recorded
$.tooling not-recorded