Guidelines on costing computing in Research Grants

A Basic Level of computing support can be expected from the School IT team without having to cost it into any research grant.  This includes:

• Installing a managed computer with a standard Operating System (Windows, RedHat Linux or Mac OS X) – the hardware should be costed separately.
• Connection to School Network
• Provision of printing and email services
• Installation of Standard desktop productivity packages ( eg Microsoft Office, OpenOffice etc) + any packages for which the School or University has a site license.  Any other packages are installed on a per item cost basis.
• A few Gbytes of Backed up network storage + a few Gbytes of network scratch space
• Help desk provision
  

Any further requirements above and beyond this basic level have to be costed into any research proposal.  If such further requirements are not included as costs in any proposal then the IT Team are not obliged to provide the support required.  These costs will be varied, depending on the nature of the proposal, but should consider the following:

• Any hardware requirements ( including basic desktop machines )

-   what processing power is required

-   what memory requirements

-   what graphics capabilities are required

-   what network storage requirements – which should include full backup costings

Detailed costings must be done in consultation with the IT Team but ball park figures on hardware costs can be found at :

Network Storage         http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/it/FAQ/storage.html

PC Desktop/laptop       http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/it/FAQ/PC_price.html

• What support and expertise is required from the computing staff.  (On research council grants, computing officer's time should appear under "Other Directly Allocated Costs”)

  Any significant hardware purchase, either processing power or network storage, will require some initial installation time and subsequent maintenance time which would be provided by the infrastructure staff within the School IT Team.  This time must be costed and should be done in consultation with the IT Team.

    Any requirement for specialist expertise from the IT Team, eg GIS development, Image processing, specialist software support, data management, programming, clustering, web development, database development and any other support requirement must be costed in any application.  This should be done in consultation with the IT Team.

In the first instance send an email to ithelp@geos.ed.ac.uk with a suitably informative subject line ( eg ‘Grant Proposal costs required’) containing a research proposal title/brief description and a member of the IT Team will get back to you promptly.  Please leave at least 10 working days before the grant application deadline for this to be done, remember that there are usually a number of grant proposals all going in at the same time.

Chris Place