Access to NeSI compute and storage resources is managed through allocations. An allocation is a certain amount of a resource, or of a rate at which a resource can be consumed, during a defined period of time (in this case, the term of the Subscription).
Depending on the nature of your Subscription, you can choose to directly manage allocation approvals for projects from your institution or leave those decisions to the NeSI Support Team. See examples of some common approval scenarios below.
Subscription used by a single project
If there is only one project associated with a Subscription, the contract’s full resource entitlement can be allocated to that single project (with the division of resources such as storage vs compute left to the discretion of the project owner).
Example: An institution has a specific use case or one-off need to accessing NeSI resources to support a research project.
Subscription used by multiple projects
If the Subscription contract covers multiple projects, the contract entitlement is split between the projects. The Subscriber can decide how it should be split, or NeSI’s Support Team can review the project requests and make a recommendation based on project requirements.
Subscriber decides
The Subscriber would need to inform the NeSI Support Team how the entitlement should be split (eg. X resource to Y project).
Example: A research institution has specific budget or resource requirements for particular projects.
NeSI advises, Subscriber reviews and approves
NeSI’s Support Team works with the research project teams from your institution to estimate their resource requirements. The allocation estimates are then forwarded to the Subscription’s Service Governance contact to be reviewed. The Subscriber can approve the requests as is, approve them with adjustments, or reject them (in which case, our Support Team would revisit options with the project teams affected).
Example: A research institution is looking to grow general usage and adoption of computational resources across a range of projects or domains. This approach can also be a useful way to benchmark resource needs and usage trends across the institution as a whole.
If you have any questions about anything mentioned on this page, don’t hesitate to get in touch.