Researchers from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester have been helping local authorities across the UK plan their carbon emissions reduction strategies with a little help from Research IT.

There has been a lot of exciting news this month regarding our Condor Pool and its new cloud bursting functionality. The good news continues as the Condor Pool has recently hit a milestone of “5000 years” of compute.

The last UoM UK Biobank Community meeting of the academic year took place at the end of June. It featured updates from the UK Biobank conference as well as presentations on how to get started with UK Biobank (a great intro for new users and a good refresher for existing users!), best practice for bulk downloads and Translation Manchester.

If you are currently using Cloud resources but are having to use your own or an institutional credit card to pay for them – help is at hand!

Our Research IT function is a key partner for many of the University’s research community and has never been in such high demand. In fact the demand has increased by around 75% over the last two years!

Angus Hearmon, as our Head of Research IT, has also seen his remit grow. To continue to meet demand appropriately, it has been decided to split the responsibilities of the Head of Research IT in to two roles.

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.