Cost control

As the new Fab service is limited by budget, rather than any physical equipment, we will be managing the service to ensure we keep within the expected spend and that enough budget is left for others to use.

The principles we will follow are:

• We are trying to reduce wastage, not limit research.
• Annual spend is kept to what the we estimated the spend to be using analysis of the jobs/tasks that were performed on Fabian when it was on-site, with an annually percentage increase in subsequent years.
• Each month will be given a proportion of that annual spend, again based on the historical data from Fabian onsite.
• We will setup alerts based on spend.
• Should spending alerts be triggered, we will start to reduce access to resources so that those who have used the most are limited first.
• We will report on cost and usage in a transparent manner.
• Should the service and its usage grow beyond that of the on-site Fabian, this will be raised with the School and further funding can be sought.
• New features, such as GPUs, will be added on the condition that they are used to reduce cost and time to science.
• For those departments, centres or projects with the funds, we can help you add to the available resources and direct those to your users.