Research IT have recently collaborated with Dr. Mabel Sánchez Barrioluengo in the Alliance Manchester Business School (AMBS) to make a large patent information database easily available to researchers in AMBS and across the University.

As it’s approaching the end of the year, it seems like a good time to look back on our most popular blog posts of 2019. What generated the most interest from our blog and newsletter subscribers this year?

This month we have a bumper collection of top tips from our Research Software Engineers (RSEs)! They are passing on a selection of good practice tips which they advise all researchers who develop or write software, to consider adopting.

Our Research Software Engineers (RSE) provide a range of services including support for existing activities at the University. Find out more about how they are helping the National Drug Evidence Centre (NDEC) to keep their key services up to date.

At Research IT we know how busy researchers are, and how talking face to face can be the easiest way to communicate a problem or complex research idea. That’s why every other Wednesday in term-time we host drop-in sessions across across campus so you can talk to our experts in person about anything research computing related.

The first UoM UK Biobank Community meeting took place on the 19th of November and the presentations on the latest updates from UK Biobank and dealing with sensitive data in the cloud are now available.

Did you know that the correct costs for Research IT services have to be included in your research grant application before you submit? These services and costs are highly dependent on the nature of your research so it’s important that you get them right. Come along to our Research IT Costing Clinic on the 12th of December to find out more.

This month's top tip is by Ian Hinder, Research Software Engineer (RSE) in Research IT, and focuses on keeping your research files safe by storing them in the Research Data Storage system provided by IT Services.

The first UoM UK Biobank Community meeting will take place on the 19^th of November and will feature presentations from Chris Boultwood, Chief Information Officer, UK Biobank and Gary Leeming from Connected Health Cities. If you are a UK Biobank user at the University then come along!

Research IT's drop-in sessions are just one of our many ways of reaching out to researchers across the University. We get some very interesting requests at our sessions and this is a great example of how our Research Software Engineers (RSEs) were able to help out.

– and it's Microsoft that could make it happen – with WSL2 (Windows Subsystem Linux 2). Find out more in this opinion piece by Research Software Engineer, Ian Cottam.

As datasets increase in size the need for more memory in your available compute hardware becomes more pressing. Applications such as R, Stata, python and MATLAB are often used to process these datasets and can require significant amounts of memory - to load the dataset, process it and generate results.