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!

Want to speak to someone about incorporating Research IT services into your research? Are you interested in using our new mobile app development service? Wondering if you could use our revamped Condor Pool for your research? Come along to a drop-in session and speak to members of the Research IT team face to face!

There was a bumper turn out at the April Research IT club which focused on our new mobile applications development service. There were many new faces and a lot of questions about how the service will run, how the collected data will be stored etc. If you were unable to make the club you can catch up now on the presentations at the links below.

As part of the Research Lifecycle Programme, The University of Manchester (UoM) has made a £1 million investment into computational resource to further enable research across all faculties and institutes.