Computing Support for Research at Informatics

When your support needs go beyond what is provided by commodity services and support what do you do? Your needs for a research project, group or institute might be for:

• new software to be installed and deployed
• newer versions of existing software to be installed and deployed
• assistance with research specific software
• features missing from a commodity service to be added
• a new service to be installed, managed and run
• installation and configuration of a grant funded server
• specific platform assistance
• enhancements to the commodity provision that are needed quickly
• a new service to be developed, perhaps from new research work

In general you can always pay in some way to get these done or to reduce the time it will take to get them done. This can happen in a number of ways:

• small things requiring little effort (most naturally quantified in hours) can be requested through support as normal and will generally just be done as soon as reasonable, subject to the urgency, impact and available effort
• larger things requiring more substantive effort (most naturally quantified in days) can be asked for in the same way, however they will be balanced/prioritized against other work according to the recharge provided by research grants from your institute to the School
• very large things requiring significant effort (most naturally quantified in weeks) would need to be explicitly approved by your institute or can be directly paid for from existing research grants or added to research grant proposals

In general support beyond commodity level for research is carried out by the Research and Teaching Unit:

• Web Page
• Wiki Page

The above is a summary of the Research Support Proposal approved at PRC for the School of Informatics. The full document is linked to below as well as a link to a diagram showing how support should flow and be charged for.

Research Support Proposal

Support Flow Diagram