The Research IT Condor Pool has always been very popular with researchers from across The University and we are pleased to announce the latest upgrade to the service.

The Research IT Mobile Development Service (MDS) enjoyed a popular launch back in April 2019 with 6 requests for services received in the first month alone. One project was commissioned immediately, and we are proud to announce it as the first app from the new MDS to roll off the production line. Ahead of schedule, it officially moves into production for release through the Google Play store and the Apple App Store by the end of the month.

Thank you to everyone who came along to the last Research IT club of the current academic year. If you were unable to attend, all the presentations are now available at the links below. There are updates from Research IT as well as the presentations on improving code to improve probabilistic treatment planning for cancer and free of charge performance optimisation and productivity services for your academic and industrial code.

Got an issue with a piece of software or code? Want to speak to someone about using our new data viz lab or our new mobile app development service? Come along to the last drop-in sessions of the academic year and speak to members of the Research IT team face to face!

The third meeting of the UoM UK Biobank Community will take place on the 27^th of June. This community is designed to bring together UK Biobank users (and potential users) from across the University to discover what other UoM research groups are using UK Biobank resources for, to swap best practice and to form a researcher led community.

Scientific research needs to be both reproducible and replicable. Over the last decade, it has become clear that many scientific papers report research findings that turn out to be false. Andrew Stewart from the School of Biological Sciences explains how the new Open Science Working Group at Manchester is engaged in addressing this problem.

Come along to the Research IT Club on the 4th of June and find out how our Research Software Engineering team is helping UoM researchers to improve radiation treatment in cancer therapy. There will also be updates on the latest computational procurement and the latest news from across Research IT.

Two months ago the Research IT HPC Pool consisting of 4096 CPU cores of Infiniband-connected compute resource (all dedicated to true HPC work) went into production. Many researchers are already running jobs on this new resource which was delivered via Research Lifecycle Programme (RLP) Change Project Z: High performance compute investments. We are now pleased to announce the arrival of further compute resources which will be available to all UoM researchers by the beginning of June.

Research IT are exploring the idea of building and hosting a library of virtual machine (VM) images, and container (Docker / Singularity) images with the aim of helping with a variety of common issues. These include setting up a Linux / MS Windows in a VM on your PC, problems moving a computational workflow from desktop or laptop to The CSF or to AWS / Azure or even managing R or Python modules.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will soon put out a call for applications for open source software projects that are essential to biomedical research. Applicants can request funding between $50k and $250k for one year. If you are interested in applying then please get in touch!

Come along to the Research IT club on the 4^th of June to find out more about a free service from POP (Performance Optimisation and Productivity) Centre of excellence in HPC. They provide free of charge performance optimisation and productivity services for (your) academic AND industrial code(s) in all domains.

Did you know that you have to cost for Research IT services before you submit your research grant applications? 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 16th May and find out more!