There are two HPC calls out at the moment – one for access to the EPSRC funded Tier 2 High Performance Computing facilities and one for access to ARCHER, a Cray XC30 machine. If you are interested in responding to either of these calls, we are happy to help with any applications, please get in touch.

Come and work for Research IT! We are looking for two permanent Research Software Engineers (RSEs) and/or Data Scientists to join our friendly, diverse team. We work on a huge variety of projects (long and short) across all Faculties and Institutes across the University, collaborating with academics and researchers of all disciplines.

It may be the summer but our team is as busy as ever! David Mawdsley (Research Software Engineer) is putting together a new workshop on Shiny. This is an R package that makes it easy to make interactive web apps using R.

It may be the summer holidays but we are still here to help! We have a couple of drop-in sessions taking place so you can turn up with no appointment to ask any questions or about research IT services including how to include Research IT services in your grant bid proposals and how to cost for research outputs such as websites, code sharing, database distribution etc.

A new member of the Research IT team, Ann Gledson, presented a paper at the IEEE SmartCity-2018 conference, demonstrating the use of a smart city dashboard for combining and analysing multi-source data.

Research IT will soon be helping Oscar Seip from Italian Studies, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures to recreate a 3D prototype model of a 16th century theatre supposedly built for the King of France, Francis I. There has been some debate whether this theatre had in fact been a ‘real’ theatre but Oscar has discovered new evidence which suggests that it did actually exist.

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 research infrastructure and software engineering and applications support as well as a fantastic example of our research software engineers in action, click on the links below.

The Research Lifecycle Programme (RLP) scoping phase is drawing to a conclusion. Over the past six months there has been an intense period of consultation with the research and support community staff through workshops, one to one interviews, deep dives, and a Thought Exchange survey. The Thought Exchange provided us with a comprehensive insight of the ideas of the community from PhD students to professors and support staff of how they envisage future e-infrastructure data management and support.

Research IT offers a range of services to UoM researchers which need to be costed for in research grant proposals. From research software expertise to research sysadmins to research data storage and production of research websites – come along to our clinic on the 21st of June to find out more!

The next Research IT club will take place on the 5^th of June and will feature updates from our research infrastructure and software engineering teams. Our two feature presentations will look at how Research IT is helping to create new parallel computer architecture inspired by the human brain. There will also be a presentation from IT Services on the planned changes to staff and cluster desktops across the university.

Thanks to a collaboration between the Multilingual Manchester research unit and the University’s Research IT group, students and citizens in Saint Petersburg will now have access to a Russian version of LinguaSnapp - The University of Manchester’s mobile app for documenting language landscapes.

The call is now out for the annual end-of-financial-year CSF (Central Shared Facility) procurement. If your research group has funds and wishes to make a contribution, this University financial year, to the CSF, please get in touch as soon as possible.