There will be a Drishti workshop on volume visualisation and analysis which will take place on 13 June 2016 (9:30 start in the visualisation suite in HMXIF at Manchester). This will be a practical workshop so attendees will cover how to convert tomography data into Drishti format, process and export it to the interactive software for display on a touchscreen.

The Data-Processing Shared Facility (DPSF) is now available to early-adopters. The DPSF is a new computational platform (developed from Hydra) which is complementary to the highly-successful Computational Shared Facility (CSF) which has been in production for several years: The DPSF is specified for high-memory and IO-intensive work.

For important security-related reasons, University of Manchester computational platforms are not accessible directly from outside the campus, nor can UoM platforms directly access Web and FTP sites which are off-campus.

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.