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!

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.