The University end of financial year is not far away! As usual, Research IT anticipate making a procurement for the Computational Shared Facility (CSF) and other Research Infrastructure platforms at this time.

Registration is now open for the next meeting of the UoM Data Science Club which will take place Thursday the 19^th May. The meeting will feature a Big Data “show and tell” from colleagues at the University of Sheffield particularly focusing on their recent experiences of using Jupyter lab notebooks and Sagemath Cloud.

Do you develop research software?

The inaugural conference of Research Software Engineers (RSEs) will be held at the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, UK on 15-16 September 2016. The event will target research software developers and research software engineers at any stage in their career.

We are looking for volunteers to help evaluate a number of general data analytics and visualisation tools to bridge the gap to more specialised software such as MatLab and Python.

Research IT have recently launched a new initiative to assist researchers at the University of Manchester – the eResearch platforms partner network.

The EU funded "Performance Optimisation and Productivity (POP) Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Computing Applications" currently provides various services to help improve performance of parallel software, including software written using MPI and OpenMP and for GPUs.

The eTekkatho project, a collaboration between the Tekkatho Foundation, JISC, the Co-op, and the University of Manchester, is an ongoing service to deliver educational resources to the people of Myanmar.

Registration is open for the upcoming third edition of the Emerging Technology ‘EMiT’ conference to be held on the 2^nd and 3^rd of June 2016 in Barcelona, Spain. Building on the successes of the previous two years, EMiT 2016 aims to continue to provide a platform to discuss cutting edge advancements in emerging computing technologies and techniques.

Dr Lee Margetts (School of MACE) is leading a 1 week "Engineering Simulation" Summer School at the Hartree Centre (Daresbury Laboratory, Warrington) that focuses on high performance computing for solid mechanics.

Even though 92% of academics say they use research software and 69% say that their research would not be practical without it^[1], it is often the case that software is cited in academic literature in a haphazard fashion – if it is even cited at all.

By the time you read this, there will be 96 Infiniband-connected Intel Haswell-based nodes in the Computational Shared Facility (CSF), equivalent to over 2,300 cores. The CSF total core count will be over 8,000.

Microsoft Research is offering free, hands-on, cloud computing training courses for university faculty, researchers, and PhD students in the UK and across Europe. Whether it is big data, big compute (HPC), or analysing data streaming from devices for an Internet of Things (IoT) project, see how easy it is using Microsoft Azure to speed up your research.