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.

Research IT have developed and supported Linux-based computational resources for many years - both batch/queue based (e.g., the CSF, Condor Pool and also the regional platform, N8 HPC) and interactive (the iCSF), but up until now there has been no viable MS Windows-based service.

The first two awards from the EPSRC USA-UK Research Software Engineer Travel fund have just been announced and Martin Turner from Research IT has been fortunate enough to receive one them. The funding aims to encourage greater collaboration between the UK and USA-based Research Software Engineer communities to help with: investigating emerging hardware and the impact on software; building collaboration around a particular science area; developing common community codes; and building links between computational / computer science and mathematics.

The Research Lifecycle project is a programme 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”. The project team are now looking for researchers who would like to contribute to the project through a short interview.

EPSRC have recently launched a survey open to all HPC users regardless of funding body, to try and understand the range of skills across the UK HPC community and the training needed to fill those skills gaps. If you use the local CSF, N8 HPC, ARCHER or any non-desktop system then read on!

We are pleased to announce that the UK BioBank Genotyping and Imputation Data Release (data for all 500,000 participants in UK BioBank) is now available for use on central compute platforms (the CSF, DPSF and iCSF). It is also available as a storage share that can be mapped as a network drive on campus PCs / desktops.

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.