Research IT

Focus on Digital Health and Digital Humanities

Many University of Manchester researchers were users of N8 HPC and the computational resource, Polaris. Polaris was switched off at the end of July and N8 HPC has now been relaunched as N8 Centre of Excellence for Computationally Intensive Research (N8 CIR).


N8 CIR aims to support the strategic research objectives of the N8 universities by building communities of practice around selected N8 strategic research priorities. Five priorities (themes) were identified in 2018 by the N8 Strategic Executive Group (N8 SEG) for N8 CIR to tackle. In the first instance N8 CIR will concentrate primarily on two themes – Digital Health and Digital Humanities.

A research roadmap will be developed for each theme in conjunction with the research community; the roadmap will identify key opportunities where N8 CIR could help to accelerate progress within that theme. N8 CIR will use the skills and expertise of research software engineers (RSEs) already working within the N8 to resolve bottlenecks and challenges faced by researchers aiming to target these research opportunities.

To initiate the roadmap development, Theme Leads have been appointed at each institution to gather feedback and requirements from the relevant communities. At Manchester the Theme Leads are Prof Niels Peek for Digital Health and Dr Andrea Nini for Digital Humanities. Both Theme Leads are organising workshops in January to gather feedback from the communities.

Please visit the N8 CIR website for event details.