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tags: research-computing
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# Staffing structure for RIE/ RSE

## What are we trying to do?

* Deliver a base service fit for purpose research science
* Free at point of use
* Suited to different disciplines
* Easily accessible and signposted
* Staffed to deliver standard services at an SLA acceptible to Leeds researchers that are fully costed, signed off and sustainable.
* Standard storage provision for research
* Delivery of some standard environments within agreed limits (per person? per project?)
* VMs and cloud
* HPC
* AI / ML
* Other?
* Training and documentation in agreed research IT techniques
* Support for grant development and costing (agreed limits?)
* Costed additional services (possibly enhanced versions of above) funded through other sources
* Additional amounts of base offering based on a standard cost/rate card
* Bespoke development of specialist environments (small works else fully-costed project)
* Full buy out of staff time (RSE/RIE/other) for research projects (short-term rather than being under the grant recoveries below)
* Specialist computer support (workstation, server, storage, VM)
* Support for targeted time to support identified bespoke research development (Steering Group prioritised)
* Some kind of agree proportion of funded time set-aside for agreed priorities
* Costed research IT development recovered through specific research project

## Some background terminology

**Research IT**: the wrapper around all *support for research* whether provided through the Business Relationship Managers; the Research Computing group; the wider IT department.

Information systems that the research process are corporate systems and therefore out of scope of Research IT.

**IT for Research**: *catalogue items* supplied from elsewhere in IT; laptops; desktops; storage; networking configuration; access to Cloud

**Research Infrastructure Engineering**: Specialised infrastructure architecture, design and support for the technologies underpinning computational and data focussed research at Leeds. This includes High Performance and High Throughput Computing, High Performance Storage and High Performance Networking. This complements and extends the standard provision for non compute-data intensive research, teaching and corporate services. It also includes public and private Cloud, IoT and emerging PaaS and IaaS services.

Weave in: Workstations and personal compute devices? There's common ground in tooling, maintenance, SLA etc. with this and "High Performance". But they are not quite the same thing and this is potentially much harder to support (with an acceptable set of SLAs) than either the **big iron** or **corporate systems**.

## What do the people do?

### Research Software Engineers do:

**Research Software Engineering (RSE) and Reproducible Research (RR) consultancy**
* Supporting researchers to embed good research programming practice into computational projects
* Agile and ResOps practices
* Good enough practices for scientific programming

**Support and consultancy with grant applications**
* Supporting PIs with turning a research question into computational outcomes
* Support with costing people and facilities
* Co-I and named researchers/ RSEs on grants
* Leading and managing software-focussed work packages

**RSE training and mentoring**
* Support to research groups with employing, training and mentoring new RSE and RSE-PDRA staff

**Postgraduate teaching and training**
* Providing technical training across a range of computational and programming topics of relevance to PhD students, ECRs and other research staff
* Teaching and other consultancy with UG and PGT courses

### Research Infrastructure Engineers do:

**Design and Architecture**

**Manage and support computational platforms for research**

**Manage and support data storage platforms for research**

**Consultancy alongside RSEs to help define the infrastructure for new research projects**

**RSE**: 19 staff

**Core theme**: 1 x G9 Principal RSE
Responsible for:
* RSE management and development
* Management support for embedded RSEs
* Portfolio management
2 x user support and training G7
1 x PM (shared with RIE)
2 x Apprentices/ Trainees (G5/6)

**Theme 1: Scientific Computing** (incl G8 Senior RSE)
2 x Parallel and Scientific
1 x Computational Mechanics
1 x Scientific Visualisation

**Theme 2: Data Science and AI** (incl G8 Senior RSE)
1 x Big AI
1 x AI
2 x Data Science
1 x Digital Humanities

**Theme 3: Tools and Practices** (incl G8 Senior RSE)
2 x IoT, Cloud and Apps
1 x Pipelines and Workflows
1 x Pipelines and Workflows (Bioinformatics)

**RIE**

Senior RIE/ RIE Manager (G8)
3 x RIE (General server)
3 x RIE (HPC specialists)
1 x Research Storage specialist
1 x Networking specialist
1 x RIE architect
1 x Research Cloud architect
1 x PM (shared with RIE)

**Research Data Service (with AT & MJ)**
Data Security Specialist

* Head of Research IT
* Architecture & Governance
* RSE
* RIE
* Research Data