Concepts in Resource Management in Core Facilities

Last modified by adm_ea@helsinki_fi on 2024/02/07 06:53

Introduction

With the cost and complexity of the equipment used in nearly all aspects of research comes the need for effective resource management. In order to have effective resource management one must be aware of some key concepts: resource discovery, usage optimization, monitoring of utilization, data management, and project management. In addition, the resource management system must be easy to use, and researchers as well as core facilities must derive direct benefit from using it.

In order to implement these concepts into practice a consortium called “Open IRIS” (Integrated Resource and Information Sharing) was established to develop a solution to meet these needs. The aim of the consortium is to establish a tool that can be used freely to facilitate resource sharing and help optimize resource usage. In this way enabling researchers to discover and share resources in order to optimize their research. In making the tool free it is hoped that it will then be widely adopted and further facilitate resource usage. The consortium also helps to embed best practices directly into the tool that other labs and facilities can benefit from (billing policies, usage restrictions, statistics reporting, system design, etc.).

Resource Discoverability

Recognising that multiple specialist tools are commonly needed in a researcher’s daily work it is essential to have a mechanism that can be used to discover any resources within a group, within an organization, or at neighbouring organizations. In addition, the spectrum of resources can range from a microscope to a 3D printer or a clean room. This is greatly facilitated by using a cloud hosted solution for resource management, which then gives the following benefits:

  1. No need to have multiple local versions of resource lists to maintain and support .
  2. Facilitates consistency of data by using consistent identifiers for resources, projects, researchers, and organizations across labs and facilities that may span multiple organizations.
  3. Facilitate collaborations and consortiums by enabling sharing across organizational boundaries.
  4. Simplifies integration of institutional logins, as well as the ability to support social logins (e.g. Google, Github, Linkedin).

However, to facilitate resource discovery one must be able to control visibility and access to resource providers and resources. This must include support for fine grained visibility and access settings that support users, organizations, groups, departments, projects and communities. As well as the optional ability to make information on resources or resource providers publically available.

 

In addition, one must make the system appealing, useful, and simple for normal labs, as well as sophisticated enough for core facilities so you have the broadest set of resources for discovery. Examples of computational clouds that provide user friendly services for biology include the Cloud Infrastructure for Microbial Genomics (www.climb.ac.uk), and the iPlant collaboratory (www.iplantcollaborative.org). At the European level, Instruct (www.structuralbiology.eu) provides a mechanism for transnational access to high-end facilities in structural biology.  However, resources must remain mindful of evolving regulations around data sharing (e.g, EU General Data Protection Regulation).  

Usage Optimization

There are essentially two ways to optimize resource usage, which are by billing for resource usage or having a way to enforce booking restrictions of resources.

  1. Billing – Billing for resource usage has a two-fold purpose, on one-hand it is to recover the costs of the usage of the equipment and on the other-hand to ensure people only use the amount of resources they need. Billing has the major disadvantage of being very resource intensive in terms of effort on all sides by taking the time of researchers, facility administrators, and finance groups. In addition, as academic research is still heavily reliant on one time large purchases for equipment and generally groups have less funding for running costs, this can also be troublesome in terms of finding the funding. In addition, billing can potentially impede creative research. In order to effectively bill charge calculation must be able to leverage complex rules based on:
    1. People – Produce prices based on rates and discounts associated with person, group, or organization in order to achieve charges based on the financial relationship of a person to a facility.
    2. Time – Price calculations should support time of day and day (weekends and holidays). This can be used to encourage people to use resources during non-peak hours in order they are more heavily utilized.
    3. Resources – Ability to assign scale and a level of detail to prices at a per resource level, often referred to as data granularity.
  2. Usage restrictions – Typically users are expected to behave fairly when using resources, but this is very difficult in reality when doing planning. The concept of “fair share scheduling” has existed for many users with cluster computing, where policies are enforced via the job scheduler, but has not had much penetration into areas of instrument usage. However, this technique can be used in resource booking by implementing the concept of “usage restrictions” where the booking system can be used to enforce certain rules which will ensure fair usage and optimize its usage. Some example rules are:
    1. Max booking duration – This is a rule in a booking system that defines the maximum length of a booking of a resource.
    2. Booking into the future – How far bookings can be done into the future, for example two weeks into the future to encourage people to not book a resource further in advance than they can effectively plan.
    3. Booking deletion policy – Not allowing the last minute cancellation of a booking, which then does not allow others to plan for available free slots coming available at the last minute.
    4. Booking limits – This can be defined in terms of hours or bookings, and can be enforced on a forward rolling or calendar basis (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly).

In order to further optimize resources, these rules should allow selective enforcement based on:

  1. Day – For example weekends and holidays may have no “max booking duration” enforced in order to encourage users with long sessions to use the resources in the evening freeing it up for light users during the day.
  2. Time – You may decide to allow a “max booking” duration of more than 2 hours in the evening to encourage people to work in the evenings for long sessions.
  3. People – There may be groups or organizations that have paid for part of a resource, so you may not restrict their usage of resources in the same way as others. For example you may limit groups or users to a certain number of hours on a resource per month, but you may not restrict a certain group that helped pay for the resource.

Utilization monitoring

Reporting of utilization is essential for resource optimization and determining where to invest. However, it can also have a side benefit of letting other users know which users of a particular resource have the most experience on it, so they may contact them for help with using the equipment. The types of reporting that can be useful are:

  1. Simple resource usage on a single resource – This can be done in manner that it is easily accessible from the resource itself so other users can see who is also familiar with a resource. It can also be leveraged for email distribution lists for a resource.
  2. Misuse reporting – This can be for example monitored on an instrument computer to report when users do not show-up for their bookings, which then blocks the usage of the resource for others. This information can be displayed publically, sent in email to the user as well as their manager, and also used in normal reporting of a facility.
  3. Usage distribution – More complex reports on usage by groups, users, and organizations on one more or more resources.
  4. Utilization – This type of reporting can be used to calculate the percent utilization of a resource over a time period. This can also be displayed in terms of off-hours usage (evening, weekends, and holidays) and day time usage. In addition this can be calculated over time to determine the effectiveness of an investment. This type of reporting will also capture downtime due to instrument failure, and give a measure of the reliability of the resource.
  5. Heatmap – This can help expose in a fast visual way what resources are most heavily used in a facility or by a user, group, or organization.
  6. Active booking – Report the number of booking sessions in a given period of time to get an impression of the activities in a facility.
  7.  Mean usage – You may want to determine the mean usage of a resource to determine the overall load on a resource.

These are very important reports that can be generated, but just as importantly is the ability to filter for or exclude certain types of resource usage based on people (user, group, or organization), time (office hours, weekends, or holidays), and type of bookings (operator assisted, training, out of service, maintenance, and regular usage).

Data management

Data management is not often linked to resource management, but by requiring users to enter certain information before and after using a resource you can produce a digital trail which can be used to enforce data annotation and produce data management plans and reports in an automated manner: breadcrumb to link data, resource identifiers, personal identifiers (e.g. ORCID), and organizational identifiers (e.g. OpenAIRE).  This linkage is made in the use of large central facilities such as synchrotrons. The SynchWeb / ISPyB Laboratory Information Management System is closely coupled to specific visits to a beamline, and covers pre-visit sample data, in-visit monitoring of data collection, and post-visit data analysis.

Project management

The resource management system must also be able to support project management concepts for large complex projects. It should include the ability to track time of individuals, milestones, and Gantt charts to chart project schedule. In addition as research is increasingly cross disciplinary and the arrival of techniques such as correlative microscopy it is important that the resource management system can be used for a wide variety of technologies (microscopy, genomics, proteomics, etc.). This then allows for more effective project management, with the ability to share and link information across technology platforms or labs.

Another important aspect of project management is the ability to assign and monitor resources used for a project, which then can also be enforced on the logins of the resources with a local agent. This can be done via requests, which permit access specific resources for a defined period of time to a specific person. These requests can then be linked back to particular project which can span several labs or core facilities. From the point of view of a user, tracking the resources used for a project helps with writing acknowledgements in publications, and with future resource requests.

Software for particular science domains often comes with its own project management tools. For example, CCP4 (http://www.ccp4.ac.uk) for macromolecular crystallography has provided tools for organising project data and reviewing computational jobs since the introduction of its first GUI around 2000. The CCP-EM project (http://www.ccpem.ac.uk) for cryoEM in structural biology is developing an analogous system. The OMERO (https://www.openmicroscopy.org/site) project for light microscopy also provides many data management tools. Image data can be imported into such systems, but it is preferable if 3rd party software can gain direct access to a Centre’s image store.