Research IT

Research IT Club February 2017

The next Research IT Club will be held on the 14th of Feb and will feature presentations on the latest developments from Research IT, making the most of our Data Processing Shared Facility (DPSF) and how researchers can be involved in the Research Life Cycle Programme. To attend the event please register so we know how much coffee to order in.

Prof Simon Hubbard will talk about how his use of our Data Processing Shared Facility (DPSF) has enabled his research. The DPSF is designed for the intensive processing of data where the requirements in terms of memory and/or storage input/output are too great for desktop/laptop machines to be used. If you would like to find out more about this resource and if your research could benefit, Research IT staff will also be on hand to answer your questions.

Staff from ITS and Research IT will be introducing the Research Lifecycle Programme which is initially a scoping exercise to identify the research capabilities required for researchers to achieve their goals. This is an ideal opportunity to feed into this programme and all contributions are welcome.

Agenda

Update from Research IT – Robert Haines and Simon Hood, Research IT

Researcher presentation “High-throughput proteomics on the DPSF: non-stop searches and the quest for zombie chicken genes”

Prof Simon Hubbard, Division of Evolution & Genomic Sciences, School of Biological Sciences

Modern bioinformatics challenges can be held up by lack of compute resources and can take too long on even a powerful desktop. Scaleable compute resources can therefore allow us to address problems that would otherwise be out of scope due to overall processing time, such as those in functional genomics. I will illustrate this with some examples from the world of computational proteomics where high volumes of mass spectrometry data need to be searched against databases of protein sequences in order to identify or sometimes quantify proteins present in biological samples. In particular, we have been investigating a historical proteomics reanalysis which might uncover some “zombie” chicken genes (really!), and deep analyses of the fly proteome looking for cases where it just doesn’t know when to stop.

“UoM Research Lifecycle Programme”

Alan Johnson, ITS and Mary McDerby, Research IT

An overview will be presented on the UoM Research Lifecycle programme to support Goal 1 of the University of Manchester 2020 Strategic Plan – World Class Research, of which the first phase – a scoping exercise has been funded.

The aim of the Research Lifecycle scoping project is to identify the underpinning research capabilities required to enable researchers to achieve their outcomes and impact which are required to enable the university to achieve the research goals set out in the 2020 Vision. The ultimate goal being to obtain the funding required to support the goals.

Questions from the floor for Research IT

Coffee

The event will take place in G107, Alan Turing Building from 3 - 4.30pm. For catering purposes we would be grateful if you could register for this event.