What I described is taken directly from a scenario that happened to me personally while working in a neuro-imaging lab. The lab didn't have any research computi

What I described is taken directly from a scenario that happened to me personally while working in a neuro-imaging lab. The lab didn't have any research computing support, neither did their department, neither did their college. The university had an IT department. The CS department had research computing support, but it was in a totally different college (and about a mile away on campus). In my story, university IT had solutions for the scenario I described. And really, their computing requirements are far from a "research computing" group. You just need to store 50 TB of data ("I forgot how to count that low?!") and have a single 8 or 16 core computer to do some number crunching. The entire setup could (and did) fit in a half rack in the neuro-imaging lab (which is what they wound up doing).