Guidance on using grant and contract funds
Certain restrictions limit how grants and contracts allow spending in support of research activity.
View the guide to using grant and contract funds for more details.
Hardware Acquisition and Computing Services
UF 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.
Software Consulting Services
In addition to applying for hardware acquisition or computing services in your proposal in coordination with 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 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 UFRC staff member. It is subsidized by the University.
An example proposal shows how to include three months of consulting services by Research Computing staff during the first year of the project and one month per year during years two and three.