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)