Grant, Contract Funds, & Budget Guide

The purchase of Normalized Compute Units (NCUs) i.e. compute cores and various storage options are viewed as an acquisition of hardware. In other words, the transaction is equivalent to purchasing hardware from a computer systems vendor. As a result, the grant or contract is not charged IDC (indirect cost), also known as overhead.

However, some grants and contracts do not allow the purchase of hardware. In this case, HiPerGator computing and storage can be purchased as a service. Rates are available for computing and storage as a service for periods of time in multiples of 3 months.

Advanced consultation from UFIT Research Computing staff is a service. Consulting services incur indirect cost (IDC).

It is possible to purchase the full lifetime (5 years) of the equipment. However, this is only allowable when the grant or contract will meaningfully use the majority of the equipment lifetime. As a result, it is possible to buy 5 years’ worth of equipment at the beginning of a 3, 4, or 5 year grant. In contrast, purchasing 5 years’ worth of equipment lifetime in the final 6 months of a grant, or in the beginning of a 6 month contract, may not be allowable.

An exception to the above exists for infrastructure awards, for which it is allowable to purchase equipment lifetime that extends beyond the life of the grant.

UFIT Research Computing will prorate the cost of NCUs and storage for the allowed and agreed lifetime of the grant or contract, but prorated purchases will incur IDC.

Some grants or contracts, like NSF and NIH Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grants, are awarded with the explicit intent that the research instrument put in place during a short period (typically 1 to 2 years) will be used for a longer lifetime (typically 5 to 10 years depending on equipment type). For computer and storage infrastructure, such grants can leverage UFIT Research Computing systems and system administration services, allowing purchases to be made beyond the life of the grant.

Increasingly, solicitations require the principal investigator (PI) to provide a detailed data management plan with a proposal that specifies how any data gathered or produced with grant or contract funds will be stored and made available to the research community for some amount of time after the grant or contract ends (typically 1 to 3 years). It is allowable to purchase UFIT Research Computing storage and computing capacity (NCUs, LSUs, RSUs, RRSUs) near the end of the grant or contract to fulfill this requirement if it is explicitly mentioned in the solicitation, the proposal, and the data management plan.

Research endeavors using Funds 201 or 209 to purchase equipment must make sure the expiration date of the grant does not exceed the service end date. Contracts & Grants does not allow charges to be processed on these funds beyond the grant expiration date listed. Any extension of the grant which covers services beyond the expiration date, or any other special circumstances, requires the approval of Contracts & Grants.  Only then will it be possible to process the invoice against these funds.

The UFIT Business Center has consolidated UFIT Research Computing billing into the central UFIT billing system.  Fiscal offices supporting HiPerGator equipment purchase must complete the MyUF Market Form for UFIT Research Computing to provide the Chartfield string for these services to be billed.  Once a purchase is requested, the UFIT Business Center will reach out to new clients with additional information and instructions for this process.

Billing questions may be directed to it-bc-ufitbill@mail.ufl.edu.

UFIT Research Computing has multiple offerings for faculty and their research groups to help them conduct their research. The most common approach to investing into computing resources is to buy a share of the computing cluster, which gives the group preferred access to a defined number of NCUs with the ability to burst to much higher numbers of processors when idle resources are available. It is also possible to pay as you go. The HPC systems come with large, fast storage, which is important in this time when more and more research includes working with very large data sets. The full description of the available offerings can be found in the Services section.

Using the details from the service offerings, a principal investigator can include a budget item and a section in the proposal text and the budget justification. Below is an example that can be easily modified for your project.

An example proposal shows how to include a $11,00 budget item for a hardware acquisition.

Please contact us for help if your proposal has more complex computing requirements.

In addition to applying for hardware acquisition or computing services in your proposal in coordination with UFIT Research Computing to leverage the investments made by the University of Florida for your project, it is also possible to apply for staff support in the form of software consulting services. Your project may require advanced programming skills to implement a software solution, install and test complex software, tune software performance, or program an algorithm. A senior staff member in UFIT Research Computing may be able to perform this task in a few months. This may be more efficient than asking a graduate student in your group to do it and leaves the graduate students and postdoctoral associates free to concentrate on the research described in the proposed project.

This rate for software consulting services is a standard rate and does not correspond to the actual salary of any UFIT Research Computing staff member. It is subsidized by the University.

An example proposal shows how to include three months of consulting services by UFIT Research Computing staff during the first year of the project and one month per year during years two and three.

Insert the text below into your proposal’s project description.

The project requires access to high-performance computing resources that go beyond what is readily available in a desktop computer or a workstation. We anticipate the need to use 40 normalized computing units (NCUs) on average as well as 8 TB of Blue storage. UFIT Research Computing operates a computing cluster with the cost to acquire these resources for the three year duration of the project for $13,000. This acquisition will allow us to burst the utilization to a much higher number of NCUs when needed for the project, which is an additional advantage for working with UFIT Research Computing. See the budget justification and the facilities sections for the details, which include the description of the support from the University that will be leveraged for this project by making the acquisition through UFIT Research Computing.

Insert a value of $13,000 in the equipment budget.

NOTE: This is not a budget item for computer services. These funds will be used to buy a portion of a larger compute cluster. They are viewed by accounting as a hardware acquisition, not the purchase of services.

Insert the text below in the budget justification. If the format of the proposal does not have a separate facilities section, you should replace the reference to the facilities section in the text below with the actual text from the Facilities section from the UFIT Research Computing proposal support pages.

UFIT Research Computing operates a cluster for research use by faculty and their research associates. The details of the operation are described under the Facilities section of this proposal. This includes a description of the resources made available by the University to support HPC-related research. By buying a part of the shared cluster at $200 per NCU (normalized computing unit), our research project leverages the whole infrastructure, which includes system acquisition, configuration, installation, administration, maintenance, and application support by professional staff to the researchers working in this project. In addition we will require 8 TB of research data storage for the proposed project; this costs $625 per TB for the five years of the project, or $125 per TB per year of the project.

The budget of (40 NCUs x $200/NCU) + (8TB x $625)=$13,000 acquires for the proposed project a system with a total of 40 NCUs and 8TB of storage along with necessary memory, disk, network, global parallel file system, and batch-job scheduling software. In addition to the guaranteed 40 NCUs, the researchers supported by the proposed project can submit jobs that request up to 10 times that number of NCUs for short times as resources are available. This will benefit the proposed project greatly, especially when results need to be ready for a conference or other deadlines.