Budgeting

There are a few key points to consider as you plan the budget for your work.

• When will you need resources
• Allow for costs to increase over time
• Data lives longer than the project funding

First, It may be difficult to translate your experiments and ideas into concrete machine sizes and storage volumes. Don't hesitate to contact us for dialogues on cost estimates. We are more than happy to share our experience from similar activities in your field, and to help with estimated for grants and other funding sources.

TIP

Check our price estimator and price examples to aid your budgeting effort.

When will you need resources

You will typically have different activity phases in your project. Some require more computational resource, others less. Note that you can update your lab resources throughout your lab lifetime.

This can be an effective way to keep costs under control, and may allow differentiated compute costs across your budget period. For example, you may use your initial time to collect data, then you may have a period with intense analysis, and at the end spend most of your time writing up your papers.

If you can afford to have resources available for your team throughout the year, it might be most effective to do so. However, if your team works in bursts of high activity, followed by low activity for at least a month, you should consider to budget with turning resources up and down.

Allow for costs to increase over time

When you plan for a project that last 3-5 years, you should consider to allow for increased computational costs.

Computer equipment do typically increase faster than the consume index. In addition, your experiment may become more advanced as you acquire new computational skills get access to more data. Such, if possible, it may be good to allow for cost to increase during your project period.

Also, projects tend to take longer than planned, and extensions typically don't come with additional funds to cover your lab costs. Such, we recommend that to allow for a buffer of your expected costs.

Data lives longer than the project funding

Make sure to budget for data archiving after the project ends.

For example, your might be required to store data for five years or more by ethical committees, typically after your funding has ended. Furthermore, you might be asked to make data or metadata available according to open science-principles, or to return it to the data controller. In either case, caring for your data after the project period must be reflected in your budget.