Did you know that there is a R users group at the University of Manchester? "R at University of Manchester" (R.U.M.), is an R User group open to all staff and students using R at The University of Manchester with regular meetings on the first Monday of each month.

BBSRC have partnered with EPSRC and MRC in a call to specifically encourage proposals relevant to “Technology Touching Life” (TTL), a joint initiative to foster interdisciplinary research into innovative and potentially disruptive technological capabilities that will drive world-leading basic discovery research in the life sciences. The call has an indicative total budget up to £3.5 million.

Computing Insight UK is the leading UK event for high performance computing (HPC), data analytics and cognitive technologies, run by the Science and Technology Facilities Council. Applications for the student poster competition are now open with free registration for all selected posters and a winning poster prize of £500.

The next Research IT Club will be held on the 25^th October and will feature updates from our research infrastructure and software engineering teams. Our two feature presentations will look at “the role of software engineers in reproducible research” and the introduction of new security controls across the university as part of the Cyber Security Program.

To attend the event please register so we know how much coffee to order in!

Would you like to be able to explore climate models and visualise their output? A new web-based tool from Prof David Schultz’s research group in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, allows you to do just that. The research team consisting of Jonathan Fairman, Stuart Anderson, and Sharon Gardner, developed the “Build Your Own Earth” model using the computational power provided by N8 HPC, the regional computing platform accessed and supported through Research IT.

Applications are now open for the RSE Cloud Computing Awards program, supported by Microsoft. The goal of the program is to create a community bridging researchers, university stakeholders, regional teams, and national services, to better understand how Microsoft Azure can enable better, faster, and more reproducible research.

These sessions are specially designed to help quickly answer any queries, questions or issues you may be having with research IT services including software help, data visualization, research data management, access to HPC resources and much much more. We can also help advise on 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.

Research IT offers a range of services to UoM researchers including access to high performance computing and research software consultancy but how do you know if these services are relevant to you and your research? If they are how do you describe them and cost them correctly in your grant proposal?

The Research IT training team have just announced a new MATLAB course aimed at those who have basic experience of using MATLAB and want to learn to write MATLAB programs and functions to perform calculations. The course covers the basics of control flow, introduces how to get optimal performance from MATLAB, and also covers MATLAB's programming tools.

Applications are now open for the Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship Programme which engages with individuals who are passionate about research software use and/or development and helps to support them to better understand the challenges faced by their domains. The programme also helps to support them as ambassadors for better software practices in their areas of working and Institutions.

EPSRC is offering open access to five new Tier-2 High Performance Computing facilities through a call for proposals. Free access to the facilities is through a two stage peer review process with an initial closing date of the 21st of September. There will only be three calls a year for access to the facilities.

Research IT is here year round for researchers but the start of year is still busy for us. Research IT will be out and about during September giving presentations to new research students who have joined the university. The presentations cover the main services that we offer researchers and highlight our training and networking opportunities.