How to use the Research Computing Portal

The two most important screens in the interface are:

• Home: this is where you request, access and manage your resources (it’s your personal dashboard)

• Resource Catalogue: this is where you browse what resources are available (it’s our product listing)

The Home page has several tools you can use to customise your dashboard, to make it an easier and more personalised space to work in. You can customise things like:

• Names of resources and Activities

• Colours of Activities

• Order of display for

  • resources (the horizontal order in which they display inside a respective Activity, or inside the Personal Resources section)

  • Activities (the vertical order in which they display down your Home page)

For more details, please watch this video walkthrough of the Portal:

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Some of the resources available in the Portal are listed as Personal Resources.

These are resources that are provided to you as an individual, and are not shareable with collaborators.

You allocate them directly to yourself and can get started with them in minutes.

Some of the resources available in the Portal are listed as Activity Resources.

These are resources that are provided, not to you as an individual, but rather to a given research activity that you define for us – what the Portal calls an ‘Activity’, basically a specific research project you’re working on and need the resource/s for.

Activity Resources can be shared with collaborators.

Unlike Personal Resources, Activity Resources can be shared with others. Activities can have multiple collaborators, and collaborators can be set with different permission types.

Important things to note:

• Once added, collaborators in a given Activity can access all the resources in that Activity.

• You can adjust permissions for collaborators, or even remove them from the Activity entirely, at any time via the Manage Activity function.

When do I need to create an Activity?

You need to create an Activity in the Portal if you want to access Activity Resources (which, unlike Personal Resources, are allocated not to you as an individual but rather to a given research activity you’re working on). You create the Activity first, and then you add Activity Resources to it as you need.

Do I just create one Activity? Or will I need to create multiple ones?

Most users will only need one Activity for all their Activity Resources.

But we ask that you create different Activities in the Portal whenever you:

• need different resources for different research projects that you’re working on (because Activity Resources need to be allocated to specific and declared research activities)

• need to separate shared and unshared Activity Resources (because once a collaborator is added to a given Activity, they have access to all the resources in that Activity)

When we provision a resource, we require someone to assume ultimate responsibility for how it’s used (essentially, to be the ‘owner’ for it). We call that person the RCAO.

We require ownership at the level of:

• Personal Resources (someone needs to own the given resource, taking responsibility for how it’s used)

• Activities (someone needs to own the Activity as a whole, taking consequent responsibility for how all the Activity Resources inside the given Activity are used)

RCAO ownership involves:

• Approving Activities or Personal Resources when they are initially created, essentially ensuring that resources are being allocated to genuine University research.

• Taking ultimate responsibility for how the resources are used.

• Acting as the contact point should any issues arise. For example, if a resource goes unused for a long time, is misused in some way, or suffers a data or security breach, we will contact the RCAO to determine a suitable course of action.

RCAOS MUST BE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE ACADEMIC STAFF MEMBERS.

If this is you, then you can nominate yourself as RCAO. Likewise, you can reassign ownership at any point to another UoM academic staff member.

If this is not you, then you must nominate someone else who meets one of the following conditions:

• For graduate researchers: your University of Melbourne academic supervisor (if your primary supervisor doesn’t meet RCAO requirements, you can choose a co-supervisor or your Head of School/Department/Faculty).

• For academic researchers: a collaborating University of Melbourne academic.

• For professional research support staff: the appropriate University of Melbourne academic.

A lot of our resources are able to be shelved. Shelving is when you temporarily suspend an instance to release cloud resources back to the pool for other researchers to use – it’s a great way to free up capacity without losing your computing instance. Shelved resources can be unshelved at any time.

We ask that you shelve your resources when you aren’t actively using them for a while, but may still need them again in the future. In fact, the Portal will auto-shelve certain resource types when they have been inactive for extended periods of time.

Read more about shelving and unshelving, and our auto-shelve schedules, here.

All our resources are able to be deleted when you are no longer actively using them, and will have no future need to use them again.

Important: Deletion is permanent and deleted data is NOT recoverable. It’s crucial to have a data retention and recovery plan in place before deleting any of your resources.

Other things to know about deletion:

• The Portal won’t allow you to delete an Activity until you have first deleted all of its added resources

• If you are deleting a cloud resource because you no longer need it for data processing, first make sure that your research data is secured somewhere else first so it doesn’t get irrecoverably lost in the deletion (store the data somewhere that meets research data compliance requirements, for example RCS’s data storage and management service)

• We ask that you remember to delete your Portal resources when you conclude your research and/or leave the University, so that capacity is freed up for other researchers and no orphan data is left behind

Some of our resources are available in special premium sizes (for when you need extra power and speed) via a reservation system.

The resources currently available for premium size reservation are:

• Research Server

Read more about reserving premium sizes here.

Some of our resources are available for multiple self-allocations per Activity, within set limits. Additionally, you may even be allowed to exceed these self-serve limits by contacting RCS for manual allocation.

The resources currently available for multiple self-allocation are:

• Research Server: you can add up to five Research Servers per Activity