Research IT

Top Ten Research IT Blog Posts of 2021

As it’s approaching the end of the term, it seems like a good time to look back on our most popular blog posts of 2021. In a year when many people returned to campus, working from home blog posts featured less but people were still keen to know how to access resources from home.

1. Announcing MATLAB Online

Published 2nd Feb 2021

With many of us continuing to work from home, announcements about accessing research software from home were always going to be popular. MATLAB licence update blog posts from 2020 also continued to be popular as researchers worked out how to continue their research remotely.

2. The University of Manchester joins the SafePod Network

Published 5th July 2021

The news that a Safepod had been installed in the University Library allowing researchers to meet security requirements whilst working with highly restricted data, confidential or personal information, was very well received!

3. Distributing Hardware-optimized Simulation Software with Conda

Published 25th May 2021

The work of our Research Software Engineers with the University eScience Lab on a BioExcel project to develop Conda packages for GROMACS was popular in May.

4. Major Investment in HPC for Research and Student Research Projects

Published 3rd August 2021

In August we announced a £800k investment for local HPC facilities, both for research and for taught Postgraduate and final year Undergraduate project students, a first for the University.

5. Using Amazon Service Workbench for Remote Training

Published 1st November 2021

In November our Training team shred their experience of using Amazon Service Workbench to teach Python remotely online.

6. Developing an Open Source Environmental Data-set and Tools

Published 6th January 2021

Our Research Software Engineers detailed the data-sets and data extraction/cleaning tools that they had developed for an Alan Turing Institute funded project led by David Topping (Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences) and Caroline Jay (School of Computer Science).

7. Shiny App Pilot Service Launched

Published 4th October 2021

In October we launched our pilot Shiny service! If you're an R user, Shiny lets you build interactive web apps to share your work with the world. We’re still accepting users so get in touch if you are interested!

8. Analysing Tweets from Twitter

Published 9th February 2021

We helped explain the new Twitter programme which allows researchers to interact with Twitter to extract data for research purposes.

9. Introducing Software Citation

Published 9th September 2021

This year GitHub announced software citation support in GitHub repositories but did you know that Research IT members played an instrumental role in making this happen?

10. MATLAB Licence Update 2021

Published 29th September 2021

The University has renewed the license to allow the download and install of the full suite of MATLAB products on to both staff and students’ own, or University provided, computers.