Governing 176 Research Cloud Projects

Ursa Major is UC Riverside's research program on Google Cloud, run by Research Computing with UCR Information Technology Solutions (ITS). The Research Computing knowledge graph listed 176 Google Cloud projects on 5 October 2026, counting Research Computing's own projects; about 90 lab projects used anything in October. Most labs want to start work today without a purchase order. I want to give them a project the day they ask, with a spending limit already on it. The controls are a budget set by Research Computing, an automatic throttle that stops running virtual machines (VMs) and AI calls at the cap but deletes nothing, caps on the shared cluster, and a read-only audit engine called Skywalker. They have limits. Google's cost data arrives hours after use, so the throttle acts late; it does not stop storage; I have no record of how often it has fired. In a late-October snapshot nearly 150 budgets existed, and some spending projects had none, a gap we are closing. A 2025 quota tool remains a prototype. Field Notes technical report. Web edition: https://charles-forsyth.github.io/papers/2026-10-29-governing-research-cloud-projects.html. This record holds the PDF (ACM sigconf, PDF/A-2b) and the LaTeX source.