Planning for the start of the new academic year is well under way in Research IT - we have just confirmed our next 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 including software, data visualization, research data management, sysadmin 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.

Dr William Sellers from the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences has been hitting the headlines with his discovery that Tyrannosaurus rex was unable move faster than a gentle jog, let alone run. The research looks extensively into the gait and biomechanics of the world’s most famous dinosaur and, using the external HPC resources accessed through and supported by Research IT, has created a new simulation model to test its findings.

Research IT recently hosted, in cooperation with Wolfram, the first Mathematica Summer Workshop. In our case "summer" only referred to the time of year and certainly not the temperature!

Mathematica is a multi-purpose scientific environment used by many researchers here at the University of Manchester. It is very good for rapid development and exploration of data, providing a convenient notebook like interface. Alternatively you can create presentations with embedded Mathematica equations as most of our presenters did. However, you certainly need to know a few tricks before getting started and that was what we aimed to provide through this workshop.

Each semester CodeFirst runs free community courses aimed to provide women with technical and digital skills. The courses are taught by volunteer instructors all across the country and this October they are coming to the University of Manchester.

They are looking for a diverse range of enthusiastic volunteer instructors for the upcoming autumn sessions. Instructors come from a variety of cultural and coding backgrounds, and include computer science/technical postgraduates, company based professionals, freelance developers, and university staff. All instructors work on a voluntary basis.

A guest blog post from Angus Hearmon, Head of Research IT, who introduces the Research Lifecycle project and explains what it means for researchers across the university.

The Research Lifecycle project is a program of work to deliver and embed systems and processes that enable and support researchers through the entire lifecycle of their research project from the conceptual phase through to the publication and archiving. This work will support the M2020 goal 1 of "World Class Research".

Research IT are pleased to announce that thanks to further investment from IT Services, the popular interactive Computational Shared Facility (iCSF) will be upgraded over the summer. Currently the iCSF has 64GB and 256GB RAM nodes (and a 2TB node) and it will be upgraded with six new high memory 256GB nodes. The high memory nodes allow much larger datasets to be processed then can usually be done on desktops and workstations.

David Mawdsley, a Research software engineer (RSE) in Research IT, presented at the recent Docker Containers for Reproducible Research Workshop (C4RR) organised by the Software Sustainability Institute.

His presentation described a new method of producing research papers using containerisation, which makes both the analysis and manuscript easy to produce and extend. This can be used as a starting point for a new, versioned publication model, which will allow early publication of results and their incremental extension.

The academic year may have just ended but here in Research IT we are already planning ahead for the start of the next one! We have released our new training courses and dates which are now available for booking. Courses include introductions to Linux, high performance computing, Python and much more.

Research IT have downloaded the UK BioBank Genotyping and Imputation Data Release (data for all 500,000 participants in UK Biobank) but we are currently awaiting the decryption keys from the UK BioBank. The keys are expected to be released at the end of June 2017 and we will make the dataset available to researchers as soon as possible after this.

The drop-in session dates for the summer have just been announced! We’ve really enjoyed hearing about your research and helping researchers from across the Faculties tackle their Research IT issues. Come along and see if we can help boost your research!

Wolfram Research in conjunction with Research IT, is hosting a 3 day, free summer workshop for researchers from across the N8 universities, including Manchester, on the 27^th – 29^th June.

Software is often a critical component of scientific research. It can be part of the academic research methods used to produce research results, or it may be the actual academic research result. Software, however, has rarely been considered to be a citable artefact in its own right. With the advent of open-source software, artefact evaluation committees of conferences, and journals that include source code and running systems as part of the published supporting material, it is expected that software will increasingly be recognized as part of the academic process. It is therefore essential that the quality and sustainability of this software is accounted for.