How to Apply for Research Funding: A Guide for Researchers
Securing funding for research projects requires careful planning, especially when it comes to justifying infrastructure and compute costs. This resource is designed to help researchers in the Higher Education and Research sectors understand, estimate, and justify these expenses in funding applications.
Key Challenges in Costing Compute for Funding Applications
Access to Infrastructure
Researchers often face uncertainty over the best available compute resources.
- Should you budget for in-house HPC, national research services, or commercial cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud?
- What institutional or shared research computing facilities can be leveraged?
Estimating Compute and Storage Costs
Many researchers struggle with calculating the true costs of High-Performance Computing (HPC), cloud computing, and data storage.
- How do you estimate CPU/GPU time, memory, and storage requirements?
- What are the long-term costs of data archiving and transfer?
Justifying Compute Expenses in Grant Proposals
Funding bodies require a clear and well-reasoned justification for requested resources.
- How does the compute request align with the research objectives?
- What are the alternatives, and why is this choice the most cost-effective?
- How do sustainability and carbon impact factor into compute choices?
How to Cost Compute for a Grant
1. Identify Your Compute Needs
- Type of compute required (eg, CPU, GPU, FPGAs).
- Expected runtime and number of simulations/jobs.
- Data storage requirements (short-term and long-term).
- Data transfer and egress costs (if using cloud services).
2. Calculate Costs Using Available Tools
- Institutional costing tools: many universities provide research costing support.
- National HPC pricing eg check ARCHER2, JADE2, or other UKRI-funded resources.
- Cloud pricing calculators: AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud offer cost estimation tools.
3. Write a Justification for Compute Costs
- Explain why the requested resources are necessary and proportional to the research.
- Provide cost comparisons and efficiency arguments.
- Consider sustainability factors (eg energy-efficient computing, carbon footprint).
Resources and Tools for Researchers
Compute Cost Estimator Tools
Sustainability in Research Computing
Comparison of UK Research Compute Facilities
Example Justifications for Compute Requests
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