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About Projects

Everything you use in Research Toolkits needs to be part of a Project; projects are the main organizing entity of Research Toolkits. Different types of projects are used to manage different types of research computing resources.

PROJECT

A Project in Research Toolkits is the top-level organizing object; all teams and services must be organized into Projects.

Project Level Data

Project administrators and members can see all projects they are part of from their home screen after logging into Research Toolkits.

When projects are intially created, the type is determined and data about the project is collected. This project data can be viewed or edited at any time by project administrators by selecting the project name, then selecting the drop down menu from the Project Overview screen:

Project Types

There are four types of Projects in Research Toolkits:

1. Self-Service

Self-Service projects can be created by any faculty member at Duke. Once the project is created, project admins can add certain services to a self-service project:

  • Virtual Machines: Faculty members are granted 4 cores and 40GB of RAM each. Multiple faculty members can collaborate on a single project with multiple RAPID virtual machines, or combine up to 3 faculty allocations for a single, larger virtual machine.
  • Storage: Data Commons scratch storage space.
  • Data Attic: Long term cold storage (note: in development, coming soon!)

NOTE: Self-Service projects do NOT provide access to the Duke Computer Cluster (DCC)! If this is something you need, you will need a Research Group Project instead (see below).

Once provisioned, the services are available to all members of the project or to certain teams within the project. Projects and resources can be deleted by project admins when they are no longer needed, which returns allocated resources to faculty to support the next project.

All Self-Service projects require an annual renewal by a project admin to remain active. If a project is not renewed, it will be deleted along with all of its associated resources.

2. Research Group

Research Groups are projects that are assigned an associated group on the Duke Compute Cluster, allowing team members to use these high performance resources for their research. In addition, Research Group projects can also have the following services:

  • Gitlab Group
  • Storage: Data Commons scratch storage space.
  • Data Attic: Long term cold storage (note: in development, coming soon!)

3. Protected Network for Research (PNR)

The Protected Network for Research (PNR) is a computational and data storage environment designed to provide Duke researchers with a secure enclave for the analysis and hosting of sensitive or regulated research data. Each PNR project includes its own subnet in this secure enclave, a storage volume, and a Duke Box folder where results can be exported safely.

4. Individual

Individual projects are available for PhD Students. These projects provide users with basic access to the Duke Compute Cluster (DCC).