We're already looking forward to 2018 here in Research IT with the announcement of our first set of dates for our drop-in sessions.

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.

There have been reports that some researchers are having difficulty accessing journals off campus. Please note that VPN is no longer required to access external publishers’ resources when off campus. Instead this information can be reached via Library Search, Library Access browser extension or direct login on the publisher website. Further information is available in the Knowledge Base article. If you have any further questions please contact the Electronic Resources Helpdesk.

Research IT took part in the latest Digilab meeting at the end of November with the aim of showing off some of our new VR equipment and to demo them to researchers from across the university. A successful day was had with lots of interest in our HTC Vive and Google Daydream VR headsets and their applications in research. There was a mix of researchers who were already using VR in their research in some form to researchers who were trying VR for the first time. Hopefully they left with some inspiration on how VR could be used in their research!

Thank you to everyone who came along to the latest Research IT Club and especially those who took the opportunity to ask questions! The presentations are now available from the links below.

The Computational Shared Facility (CSF) has now officially come of age - it has reached an amazing 10,000 CPU cores - with around 4000 cores of Haswell / Broadwell and a Skylake procurement coming up in January.

Essential security and performance upgrades are to be applied to the central Research Data Storage system (sometimes known as Isilon). A period of maintenance will take place on 08:00 – 12:00 on 9th December.

Research IT run a number of computational research platforms for The University, including the Computational Shared Facility (CSF) and the Condor Pool; we also help support the regional N8 HPC platform. Until now, all computational resources have been Linux-based.

A new policy has been announced on Research Data Storage which affects all researchers. The University very strongly discourages the use of local storage devices (e.g. USB disks) and "in-house" data storage platforms (e.g. local NAS servers), otherwise known as “point storage solutions”.

We plan to update you regularly on the Research Life Cycle programme so you can keep fully up to date with progress and, more importantly, find out how you can be involved and contribute to the project.

The Research Life Cycle (RLC) aims to deliver uplift in management and support of Research within the University to support the goal of world class research. This will be done through a set of targeted substantial investments to provide streamlined research support and upgrade in the e-Research infrastructure of the University. An outline budget of £15M over 5 years has been set.

The university has recently announced a 5 year partnership with BBC Research and Development and seven other UK Universities to unlock the potential of data in the media. We are pleased to say that Research IT staff will be using their expertise in several areas of this important project.

Two of our Research IT experts gave a presentation at the recent “R at University of Manchester” (R.U.M.), 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.

The next Research IT club will take place on the 29th Nov, slightly earlier so as to avoid clashing with Christmas festivities! It will feature updates from our research infrastructure and software engineering teams. Our two feature presentations will look at how Research IT helped to improve the comparison, annotation and mark-up of a collection of scans and the introduction of a new data service for users of NHS data. To attend the event please register so we know how much coffee to order in!