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.

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.