Members of our Research Platform team (formerly known as Research Infrastructure and Platforms) presented at a short workshop organised by Prof Julia Handl (e-Research Lead for Humanities).

The workshop was designed to help us better understand the needs of current users of our Interactive Computation Shared Facility (iCSF) and CSF3 but also the potential needs of researchers not currently using the facilities but whose research might benefit.

Pen Richardson and Simon Hood talked about the facilities that are currently available to all researchers and explained how to access them, any associated costs / charging model etc. Pen also gave a demo of the iCSF and CSF in action using Humanities relevant examples as well as demos and examples of use of the iCSF and CSF from Dr Sarah Zhang (AMBS) and Dr Patrick McNamara (School of Social Sciences). The availability of other off-campus facilities such as the N8 CIR GPU machine (Bede) and Cloud was also discussed.

There was also plenty of time for discussion with a great many suggestions of how we can help Humanities researchers be more productive on our current platforms for example introducing MS Windows-based computational resource, potential use of M365 storage and integration with our compute platforms.

We will continue to meet with Humanities researchers every two or three months to continue our discussions and to report back on our progress. We will also be feeding back the comments in to the second iteration of the Research Lifecycle and Innovation Programme particularly under the computational change projects in order to help facilitate the desired service/platform changes and improvements.

If you are interested in hosting a similar event in your Faculty or School please get in touch!