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.

Are you a Humanities researcher? Would you like to be able to repeat a simple computing task several times but don’t want to use your own machine to do this? By using the UoM computational shared facilities (CSF) you can offload your jobs to the high performance computing (HPC) facility. This will allow you to save space and resources on your own machine to work on something else.

The Condor Pool is a high-throughput computing (HTC) resource freely available to all researchers at the University of Manchester. The pool largely comprises of many of the PCs around campus located in teaching clusters. At night and at weekends, these are rebooted into Linux and used to run large numbers of computational jobs.

Last year, we held workshops to gather input on spending Research Lifecycle Programme (RLP) funds on developing our computational resources on a year-by-year basis.

We are already looking ahead to next year, and feedback from our research community is important in making sure we have the right resources in place for the future.

Research IT's vDAL (Visualization and Data Analysis Laboratory), isn't only a place for exploring different realities with your research with VR, but a way to test out graphically intensive research.