Tutorial: Creating a Budget on MyOSC

Hello, and welcome to creating a budget video tutorial. This tutorial will be going over how to use the MyOSC app to create a new budget on your project. It'll be specifically going over how to create a budget for an existing project, but it's also applicable for creating a budget on a new project as the process is mostly the same.

Our first step is to go to my.osc.edu, enter our login information, and click the login button. From here we will be on the dashboard page and we can see a list of our projects down on the project summaries. You can also see a list of your projects if you go to "Project" > "Project List" and then click. I'm going to be using PTEST0002 as the example. So I go to my project details. As you can see I don't have an active budget, so I'm going to click the "Create New Budget" button.

Now we land on the "Create New Project Budget" page. Here we can see basic information about our project: the title, the type, project code, and the service agreement that this project is under. If you want more details about the service agreement, you can click this "details" button. There's also an option for time frame. So here you can select the current fiscal year or the next fiscal year. OSC defines "fiscal year" as July 1st to June 30th. Note that a budget cannot be scheduled for the next fiscal year if the current budget for the current fiscal year is not already in place. If you would like a different time frame that doesn't correspond to fiscal years, you can contact OSC, and we can assist. Next, we'll look at the "Org Fiscal Reference". So this is a field used for accounting, normally, and you can refer to your institution's guidelines on how they want you to fill out this optional field. Next is the "Fiscal Approval" checkbox. So this is an option for PIs of an institution that have the ability to create a budget without it first being reviewed. You should refer to your institution on what you need to do in order to check this box. Next we'll see the "Note to Reviewers" option. This is just an optional text field. After that, we can see there is a "Do you want to set a dollar budget?" question. If you select "no" then there will be no limit on the amount of charges that this project can accumulate by submitting jobs to the HPC cluster. If you select "yes" then there will be an upper limit. This is because a dollar budget limits the charges a project can accumulate, but it's called a "soft limit" because the set limit may be exceeded. This is due to the fact that jobs submitted to our HPC clusters are not uploaded to my.osc.edu until the day after they're completed. Once jobs are uploaded, they reduce the dollar budget under the project it was run under. Next, we can go to the "Requested Budget" field, and I'm going to enter $1000. Usually entering $1000 is appropriate because most PIs will be eligible for the annual OSC credit of $1000. Next, we can see that there is a "Requested Storage" option. So here you can enter an amount: I'll enter "5". This will send an email to OSC staff to create project space for your project. Note that if you want to make adjustments to your project spase – increase, decrease, remove – you should just contact OSC Help instead of creating a new budget. Lastly, note that there is a budget estimator tool. This can be used to estimate the cost that your project will have given a certain amount of core-hours, GPU-hours, and storage amount. So I'm going to go ahead and check "Fiscal Approval" and then click "Save and continue".

So now we can see I'm on the "Review Budget Request" page. This lets me review all the information I entered previously. I did enter "$1000" for the budget. I did enter "5" for the project storage amount. It was for the current fiscal year, so that starts today. The budget has a start date of today, which is within the current fiscal year, and it has an expiration date at the end of this fiscal year. Note that on the bottom there is an option to upload a document. If this was a classroom project OSC asks that the PI would upload a syllabus for that class. And also if it's a workshop: a document describing the workshop. Next, we can see that there's the "Activate this Budget" button, so when I click this, this will put the budget in effect. If my institution had set up a review process, this would be a "Review Budget" button and it would send review emails to the appropriate people. Once they approve it, then it would activate the budget for that case. So now it brings me back to project details. We can see that I have a new budget set up for $1000. I automatically got the $1000 annual credit for PIs.

That concludes this tutorial. Thanks for using OSC, and please contact oschelp@osc.edu if you have any questions.