NCI Guidelines

Centre’s CIs and supervisors


You are expected to know these guidelines and to advise your ECRs and teams to consult these guidelines. You are expected to contribute to the Centre with additional contributions, from NCMAS, your university share etc. where possible

NCI Project Representative


A project representative is either the Lead Chief Investigator listed on the project application or their delegate in charge of resource management.

Resource allocation at NCI happens quarterly, however, within the Centre we try to balance resource usage between our projects more frequently.

Project representatives are responsible for:

  • Estimating quarterly SU requirements in collaboration with all project members, to ensure that there are available resources for all members
  • If SU requests for a quarter are much larger than usual, the project representative is in charge to discuss with the Lead CI, the CMS team and eventually the RP Leads to ensure either the requests can be fulfilled or to set up priorities.
  • Communicating with CMS the project's SU and storage requirements, so that resource usage can be balanced across the centre
  • Reading and replying (when necessary) to usage update emails sent by CMS
  • Reviewing project membership regularly

You will have a lower priority for access to Centre’s resources if there are underused resources in other projects you have access to.

NCI Project Members


All members of an NCI project have requirements for using Centre resources. Resources are shared by all members of the project, please make sure that other members are able to do their work.

General

  • Everyone who intends to use more than 10% of the usual project allocation is responsible for communicating their compute time requirements to their project representative before the start of each quarter.
  • Everyone is responsible to know their projects CIs ([[1]]) and how their project is organised (who does what). Write an email to your project Lead CI if you don’t know.
  • Everyone is responsible to plan their usage in compute time and storage.
  • Keep your contact details up to date on [[2]], even after leaving the Centre if you still need access - we will use these details when contacting project members.
  • Before leaving the Centre you need to tidy up your space following the best practices guides (refer to Leaving the Centre).

Data Resources

The ARC requires the Centre to abide to the Open Access policy. Existing CMS policies already comply with Open Access requirements for publishing data. Guidelines are online.

  • Everyone is encouraged to fill in a data management plan to better keep track of your data and storage requirements
  • Everyone is responsible to know the best practices for each file system at NCI. Please ensure any data in group spaces (/short, /g/data, massdata) are readable by your group:
  • Check the central data store (data wiki page, NCI data catalogue, Python conda install, modules) and request your data or software package centrally if not already there. Do not download/install yourself before asking for central resources, we want to avoid duplicating data as much as possible

Compute Resources

  • Large simulations should be approved by the Lead CI. Large is more than 60-70% of the usual quarterly time allocation for the project
  • Very large simulations should be approved by the Research Program. Very large is more than 100% of the usual quarterly time allocation for the project (i.e. will cover multiple quarters or will require a substantial increase in allocation for the project)

CMS Team


The CMS team is here to provide support in managing project resources. We will:

  • Send frequent usage updates to project representatives
  • Provide resource usage estimates for commonly used model configurations
  • Liaise with NCI to set quarterly compute resources, and modify resources within quarters if required
  • Give generic and specific advice to users in managing their resources

include component="page" wikiName="climate-cms" page="nci_guidelines_index" editable="1"