As part of the Research Lifecycle Programme (RLP) we are looking at procurement processes alongside HPC provision. We know that many researchers at the University are already using Cloud provision and that many more would like to do so. However at the moment there is no official process in place to procure or access Cloud resources.

Thank you to everyone who came along to the latest Research IT Club and especially those who took the opportunity to ask questions! To see presentations on the latest news from the research lifecycle programme (RLP), research IT infrastructure and software engineering and applications support as well as an interesting use for your Android phone, click on the links below.

We have just announced a new course – Introduction to Mathematica, which is available now for booking to all research staff and PGRs. Remember that all our courses are free to University of Manchester staff and PGRs!

Research IT has recently been involved in an exciting new use case which aimed to help people with a chronic lung disease self-report the impact of their symptoms on their wellbeing and to view their data.

We are pleased to say that the HPC business case to the Research Lifecycle Programme was successful! This means that we now have substantial funds to invest in research IT infrastructure such as computational resource, VMs, storage, etc and we need your help!

New researcher or PGR student? Completely confused about Research IT? Come along to a drop-in session and speak to members of the Research IT team face to face. We run regular drop-in sessions where you can come along and ask anything about research IT – issues with research software applications, problems with your code, queries about research data management or perhaps just to find out more about new technologies such as data visualization!

The popular conference, Computing Insight UK (CIUK), returns with the main theme of “Research Computing Delivers” and also be four sub-themes of “Career paths - service provision roles”, "Working with industry", Applications science" and “Data science”. Students who are interested in attending can submit a poster abstract which, if accepted, will grant them free registration to the event.

Did you know that you can speak to members of the Research IT team face to face without making an appointment? We run regular drop-in sessions where you can come along and ask anything about research IT – issues with research software applications, problems with your code, queries about research data management or perhaps just to find out more about new technologies such as data visualization!

Are you interested in using mobile devices, such as phones and tablets, for real-time, interactive computational fluid dynamics (CFD) – the simulation of fluid flow? If so then come along to our first club of the new academic year on the 11th of October! You can find out more about this and the opportunities that digital transformation could bring to the university.

Are you a new researcher at the University of Manchester? Do you know how to cost for the services that Research IT offer in your research grant applications? Come along to our Research IT Costing Clinic and find out more about our services, how to include them in your research grant application and how to cost for them!

Here at Research IT we provide access to a central copy of the UK Biobank 500,000 participant release of genetic data. This saves Biobank-approved projects huge amounts of storage and provides convenient access to the data via desktops and central compute platforms. A question we are being asked more frequently is whether there is a local UoM community in which to share user experiences and ask questions about the data and its analysis.

We are pleased to announce that there has recently been a significant investment in the Central Shared Facility (CSF). Over 1000 CPU cores and 16 Nvidia V100 GPUs are coming online in the next few weeks and there is further investment to come in the next few months!