Obtaining Priority Access Fees for Academic Use
ARCHIE Principal Investigators (PI's) are required to obtain priority access fees for ARCHIE, where possible, for themselves and/or other users associated with their project.
It is necessary for us to improve the sustainability of ARCHIE-WeSt to ensure that we have funds to invest in future HPC provision. In fact, this is a requirement placed upon us by the University.
The priority access fee rate (availabe here) is non-profit making.
External Academic Users
External PI's/users should include in any grant application, where possible, an amount of core-hours at the rate of £0.03 (inc VAT) as a Directly Allocated Cost. For example, EPSRC guidance states that Directly Allocated Costs can include "The costs of access to major or small research facilities attributed on the basis of charge-out rates" ( for more information see here and here).
Strathclyde University Users
RCUK Funding Applications
The running costs of ARCHIE-WeSt are included in the University Estates charge which is applied to all grant applications. Consequenltly, we cannot explicitly add ARCHIE fees as a Directly Allocated cost to RCUK grant applications, since that would mean we would be double charging RCUK.
However, there is an internal University mechanism which allows us to claim ARCHIE-WeSt access fees from University overheads. The fees should be included in pFact in the Justification of Resources section (see below). The fees are not added to the total cost of the grant and not submitted to the funder - they are claimed internally from the University.
University guidance on this process is available here.
Tip
ARCHIE priority access fees can be reclaimed from University overheads at no additional cost to a RCUK grant application
The following procedure should be followed:
New FMS Costing and Pricing Module
- Identify the amount of core-hours required for the project:
- CPU core-hours are charged at the priority rate of £0.02
- GPU hours are charged at the priority rate of £0.60.
- Storage above 3TB should be costed at £10 per TB per month.
- Currently, only the CPU core-hour rate is available on FMS, therefore GPU and storage costs have to costed using core-hour "currency", for example 1 GPU-hour = 30 CPU core-hours
- Click on the "PI Additional Questions" tab
- Answer "Y" to "Q7a Access?"
- Q7b: Enter "ARCHIE WEST" for the name of the facility and the number of core-hours for the "Units required"
- Notify the Facility Manager of
- The core-hours required
- The "Record Ref" no. of the submitted proposal
pFact
- Identify the amount of core-hours required for the project (to be charged at the priority rate of £0.02)
- Add the relevant information to the 'Additional Fields' >> 'Research Facilities' section of pFACT (Q11 a-c)
- Answer yes to Q11a & Q11b
- Answer Q11c as directed
- In 'Justification of Resources', state how many core-hours at £0.02 are required under a sub-heading 'University Contributed Resources'
- Notify the Facility Manager of
- The core-hours required
- The pFact ID of the submitted proposal
Non-RCUK Funding Agency Applications
If the funding agency concerned allows for facility access fees to be included in the funding application, then the required amount of core hours should be incoprorated into the grant application and costed at £0.02 per core-hour.