Re:All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
by lostlogin on Thursday March 25, 2021 @09:59PM
(#26588039)
This is usually handled much more elegantly by senior academic staff.
You contact a department who’s services you use a lot, then you arrange to pre-pay for services. Ideally you negotiate a discount.
Then you use the service and state which grant to draw from.
This way you have grants paying for things that are completely unrelated to their intent, you have one nightmare of a billing system which no one understands and you get to use everybody cent.
Re:All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
by chuckleMuscle on Thursday March 25, 2021 @08:21PM
(#26587430)
This as a fairly recent occurrence in my research group. It’s often quite tedious because you don’t want to waste the money and it’s never clear if there’s going to be a period where we’re short on cash at some point in the future. most of it’s spent on boring but expensive things to be used down the line. Would be far better if funding wasn’t quite so cyclical!
Unfortunately I couldn't think of much. I suggested maybe we buy some more computers with it but I'm sure he'd already thought of that himself. I don't know what he ended up doing, but I'm sure he'd have decided to buy something with it rather than just losing it entirely.