CLIMB-BIG-DATA aims to become self-sustaining in less than five years and the pathway towards self-sustainability has been detailed in a business case that was approved by the MRC.
Since the business case gained UKRI approval, users will be able to cost CLIMB-BIG-DATA directly in their grant proposals. How much to cost will largely depend on the specific needs of each project, so current and/or potential users are encouraged to get in touch with us (Lisa.Marchioretto@quadram.ac.uk) while writing their grants to receive a personalised quote.
How much could it cost?
Access to the infrastructure (compute)
As an approximation, users should on average devote 2% of the total budget for their grants to the CLIMB-BIG-DATA infrastructure. So, for example, someone submitting a three-year £600K project grant should cost in £12K for the CLIMB-BIG-DATA services.
Training
CLIMB-BIG-DATA also aims to recover costs for training activities that use our infrastructure, e.g. £10 per VM per week -> 40 people for 4 weeks = £1,600.
Research Software Engineer
CLIMB-BIG-DATA can offer the collaboration and help of a research software engineer. This would be costed at ~£1000 per week (or £27/h) —maybe useful if users need help getting pipelines set up.
Examples
Costing example #1
A user is submitting a £600k 3-year grant proposal. The project involves intensive bioinformatic analyses and the user plans to use CLIMB-BIG-DATA for these analyses. The user wants to collaborate with a research software engineer (RSE) to set up a pipeline for their analyses and estimates this collaboration to last for 2 weeks.
In this case, the cost to include in the grant would be £14k – calculated as follows: 2% of the grant total cost (£12k) + 2 weeks of an RSE (£2k).
Costing example #2
A user is submitting a £600k 3-year grant proposal. The project involves bioinformatic analyses, and the user plans to deliver one training activity for 20 students and wants students to be able to practice for three weeks on a CLIMB-BIG-DATA virtual machine.
In this case, the cost to include in the grant would be £12,600 – calculated as follows: 2% of the grant total cost (£12k) + 20 virtual machines for 3 weeks (£600 = £10 per VM/week * 20 VMs * 3weeks).
Costing example #3
A user is submitting a £600k 3-year grant proposal. The project involves intensive bioinformatic analyses, the set up of a bioinformatic pipeline (4 weeks of an RSE) and its containerisation (2 extra weeks of an RSE). Moreover, the user wants to train 40 students for 5 weeks on the use of this pipeline.
In this case, the cost to include in the grant would be £20k – calculated as follows: 2% of the grant total cost (£12k) + 6 weeks of a RSE (£6k) + 40 virtual machines for 5 weeks (£2k = £10 per VM/week * 40 VMs * 5weeks).