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Learned something that suddenly makes my career make a lot more sense. There is no mechanism in Swedish higher ed that punishes a university department for a low research output. Only for a low student throughput.

Janne Moren

@mrundkvist
The punishment is lack of external funding. But if the department doesn't rely at all on funding agencies for their operating income then that's not effective of course.

In the sciences external funding is important enough that a history of consistently getting external funds counts higher than even your publications.

@jannem When I was in grad school my department had no external funding. Our situation was extreme, caused by our Chair's debilitating alcoholism.

@mrundkvist
Yes, there are dysfunctional places around. I've heard various horror stories from Swedish and other universities.

In general though, a researcher and a department needs external funds to have a functioning research program, post-docs and so on. And one of the major factors for getting a grant is your publication record in the subfield.

@jannem But some departments need to rent time on the Large Hadron Collider and Webb Telescope. Others need to send a few potsherds to a lab somewhere.

@mrundkvist
I can't imagine doing a dig like you do is free. Permits, equipment, paying land owners, logement and food, people, transport, insurance, lab costs ...

Even theoretical mathematicians still need money for hiring postdocs, going to - or arranging and holding - conferences and seminars, visiting colleagues and so on. It's not LHC money, but it doesn't fit under your office budget either.

I'd say in the sciences it's almost impossible to do "real" research without external money.

@jannem I'm twitching between "buying LHC time" as a metaphor for expensive experiment use with a name most people know, and my knowledge with how the actual LHC works in regards to funding and science. @mrundkvist

@maswan @mrundkvist
I was just rolling with Martins example :)

But replace "LHC" with, say, "cryo-EM microscope", "high throughput sequencer" or "cluster CPU hours and storage" and the idea holds just fine.

Edit: I guess with CERN, if your project is accepted there's no argument about payment, am I correct?

@jannem Building an experiment at the LHC is a decades long process of instrument design, pitching the scientific case, finding funding for it, etc. It isn't like cryo-EM, or to take an archaeological-adjacent infrastructure Diamond light source (used for the Herculaneum scrolls) where the infrastructure is there for lots of small experiments from various teams.

The LHC is a discovery machine built for four experiments, funded through member fees from lost of countries.
@mrundkvist

@jannem Sweden is a member of CERN and two of the big LHC experiments, this is paid by national funding sources with long-term commitment.

When an individual or group of scientists comes up with an idea, they implement a search for whatever they are looking for and then run it against the accumulated data from the experiment they are a member of.

And since only a small part of the work is this particular software search, all significant members of the experiments get authorship.
@mrundkvist

@maswan @mrundkvist
Exactly, the funding is effectively through the member states, not something that happens through the normal agency mechanism.

But is that still true at small scale? As in, is a post-doc working for an experiment always funded directly by CERN (or their home country as a member state), or did somebody get external funds to cover that salary?

@jannem Most scientists are not funded by CERN, they are funded by their local university or institute, with the possibility for external funding from research councils etc.

Most of the storage and computing infrastructure for the big LHC experiments (my job) is nationally funded without the money going through CERN.
@mrundkvist

@maswan @mrundkvist
I thought CERN had quite a lot of HPC infrastructure for itself? Or is that just for the data collection stage, and the actual analysis is supposed to happen using other resources?

@jannem They do, especially storage, but it is maybe 5-10% of the needs.

A short introduction to the World-wide LHC Computing Grid, which is made up of 1 tier-0 site, ~10 tier-1 sites, and ~300 tier-2 sites:

Data is generated at the LHC experiments and has some first level of processing done. One copy of data is saved at the tier-0 site (CERN), and one copy is distributed over tier-1 sites, which also do bulk processing.

Tier-2 site have some disk storage and computing, of various size.

@jannem Providing tier1/tier2 sites is expected from the member institutes of the LHC experiments, to cover their "fair share" of the total storage and computing needs.

I run a small tier-1 (distributed over the Nordics), and it is 50 PB of disk, 50 PB of tape. For compute we're pretty small with just 10k cores, but we're pushing 10-40 GBytes/s of data out from storage into the compute, so data staging, caching, and access is a big thing.

@maswan
Yes, I always got the impression it was mainly data-heavy workloads, especially at the earliest stages of filtering the output.

50PB is nothing to sneeze at! Way more than we have (12PB) and we have a lot of sequencing data to deal with.

@jannem Vid svenska högskolor är forskning ett tillval som man får försöka finansiera själv. Om en institution inte sköter undervisningen blir man däremot nedlagd.