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Collaborator

A Collaborator is an organisation that is a signatory to the NCI collaboration agreement or has signed a contract with the ANU for services offered by NCI.

A Major Collaborator is an organisation that has signed the NCI Collaboration agreement and has made a significant financial commitment for an extended period. 

The Collaborator organisational contact is typically the financial delegate or contract signatory who approves changes to the contract and nominates an administrative contact, known as a Scheme Manager, to administer the resources purchased under contract.

Scheme

A Scheme is the name given to an identifiable set of storage and compute resource entitlements for a Collaborator, based on a collaboration agreement or contract.

Scheme Manager

The Scheme Manager, for a given collaborator organisation, performs administrative tasks and is a key point of contact between NCI and the research users within that organisation on operational matters.

The Scheme Manager is responsible for:

  • Approving creation of new projects within his/her scheme
  • Removal of projects over which they have authority
  • Appointing a Lead Chief Investigator (a head researcher) to oversee a project
  • Approving the suspension or removal of individual researchers from their organisation
  • Approving the distribution of an organisation’s resource entitlement between approved projects
  • Liaison between the NCI and the collaborator organisation’s research community on operational matters.
  • Informing his/her researchers about developments at NCI.

NCI requires a scheme manager to be an authoritative point of contact, so collaborating organisations are required to nominate one individual, with awareness of the organisation’s HPC activities, as Scheme Manager. A Scheme Manager is expected to nominate a proxy or a substitute when going on leave. At the monthly NCI scheme managers update meeting, however, more than one representative from an organisation may attend.

Project

A research project, often referred to as a project, is an identifiable activity that is granted resources to access services at NCI.

Researchers undertake their computational research by joining a project to use the compute, data or storage resources associated with that project.

Projects can consist of one or more project members (researchers) and are managed by a nominated Lead Chief Investigator (Lead CI). 

Lead CI

The Lead CI is specifically responsible for the following:

  • Ensuring the resources of that project are used efficiently and effectively
  • Approving the addition of new members to the project
  • Removing old members from the project
  • Reporting on the research outcomes from that project
  • Project cybersecurity

Researcher

A researcher is a member of a project and is responsible for:

  • Ensuring the resources of that they use are used efficiently and effectively
  • Ensuring that their information within the user portal, MyNCI (https://my.nci.org.au) is kept up to date
  • Jointly ensuring security of the project
  • Abiding by the ANU and NCI security policies and end user terms and conditions
  • Following the directives of the Lead CI
  • Personal cybersecurity