Research IT News
Computing Insight UK 2016
STFC are lining up an exciting programme of speakers for you at CIUK 2016, ready to highlight the way high performance computing, data-centric and cognitive technologies are accelerating research, boosting business and changing the world around us.
MathWorks Webinar: MATLAB for New Users
MathWorks are organising webinar to introduce MATLAB, a high-level language and interactive environment for numerical computation, visualization, and programming. The course will take place 2nd August 2016.
MATLAB includes built-in mathematical functions fundamental to solving engineering and scientific problems, and an interactive environment ideal for iterative exploration, design, and problem solving. Through product demonstrations, you will see how this combination allows you to quickly explore ideas, gain insight into your data, and document and share your results.
Please allow approximately 45 minutes to attend the presentation and Q&A session. This webinar will be recorded, so if you can't make it for the live broadcast, register and we will send you a link to watch it on-demand.
For more information and registration please visit the event website.
Replacing IT kit? Be careful what you throw out
All staff and researchers are responsible for ensuring that any private data is kept secure, and IT Services can help you do that with your old computer equipment.
Throwing an old hard drive or computer in the bin or leaving it a loading bay, risks exposing confidential information to someone with malicious intentions. It’s usually possible to recover deleted files, and often possible to retrieve information from a faulty hard drive.
The consequences of this can be catastrophic; the University could be fined up to £500,000 for a serious breach of the Data Protection Act. There’s also the possibility of confidential research data being exposed, and personal or reputational damage.
Don’t risk it.
If you have any old laptops, computer hard drives, USB drives, DVDs or even dusty old floppy disks to dispose of, bring them to B29 Pariser Building or the Kilburn Building IT Support Centre, where all the data will be securely deleted and processed appropriately.
You can can even bring old keyboards, mice and other small peripherals, but please speak to a colleague in the IT Support Centre first if you need to dispose of larger items such as desktop PCs, monitors or printers, as they may need to collect these from you.
Find out more:
Note for staff and researchers in labs: If your IT equipment is currently in a lab which requires decontamination before disposal, please ensure this takes place before you remove it.
UK Data Service Open Data Dive
The UK Data Service and Digital Innovation are running an intense all-day hackathon on Saturday 24 September at The Shed at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU).
The UK Data Service Open Data Dive aims to bring together coders, data enthusiasts, graphic designers, project managers and pizza lovers into the same room to hunt down, crunch and beautify open social and economic data.
The Open Data Dive is free to attend and open to everyone. Free lunch and drinks will be provided.
Newcomers are welcome and there will be data specialists and programmers from the UK Data Service on hand to provide support and help. During the day, short parallel workshops will run on finding and understanding data, using APIs and big data.
For more information and registration follow the links below.
An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language
Join Wolfram Training for free online training series based on Stephen Wolfram's book An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language. Each session covers different chapters from the book in depth and explores additional examples and exercises. Learn how to perform calculations, manipulate images, analyze real-world data, and even deploy your own cloud apps with the powerful and elegant Wolfram Language. And don't miss out on the opportunity for interactive Q&A with the host, Wolfram Language veteran Dave Withoff.
New speakers announced for UoM Data Science Club
The next meeting of the UoM Data Science Club will take place on the 14th of July with registration closing on the 12th.
Register now to hear about the new University of Manchester Data Science Institute from Prof Magnus Rattray and developments in Data Science at Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research (CMIST) from Prof Rachel Gibson. There is also a keynote presentation from Peter Smyth from the UK Data Service explaining how you can get involved with the UK Data Service’ Hadoop system. This will be followed by a presentation from a local Hadoop user, Mihaly Berekmeri, who will relate his experience of using Hadoop and IBM BigSQL.
Farewell to Head of Research IT
This month we say good bye to Kurt Weideling, Head of Research IT who is leaving to take up the position of Director, Information Systems and Digital Services at Manchester Metropolitan University. Since his arrival, Kurt has overseen the re-organisation of Research IT, development of a new governance model as well as putting in place a future strategy and roadmap for Research IT. The Research IT team would like to wish Kurt all the best in his new role.
Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop: ‘Engineering Academic Software’
How should we build the research software of the future? This was the question under consideration at the Dagstuhl Perspective’s Workshop ‘Engineering Academic Software’, co-organised by the Software Sustainability Institute’s Manchester PI Carole Goble. Experts in the area from across the world spent an intensive week presenting, discussing, debating and writing, to define current problems in the field and determine how we could address them.
Fifth Autumn Academy for HPC
The HPC Short Courses Consortium Fifth Autumn Academy for High Performance Computing (HPC) will be held at the University of Cambridge from the 12th to 23rd September.
It’s an intensive two-week course designed to train researchers to start modifying and developing effective and efficient code for applications in HPC. It is suitable for any researcher who has some familiarity with programming and would like to start modifying and/or writing code for use on mid and high performance computer resources.
Application for Machine Time - 6th Intel® Xeon Phi™ Coprocessor Access Programme
The Hartree Centre is pleased to announce a sixth programme of access to its Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor cluster.
This is for projects from academia and industry that would like to experiment with their code on this exciting new architecture.
The sixth phase covers the period between Monday 25th July and Friday 21st October 2016.
Introduction to version control using Git
Research IT will be running a new full-day course providing an intensive hands-on introduction to version control using Git on Wednesday 6th July 2016.
The course is aimed at those who have no or little experience of version control. It will cover:
- What version control is;
- The main benefits of using version control;
- How to set up and work with a local repository;
- How to work with remote repositories using GitHub;
- Topics such as branching, resolving conflicts, merging and rebasing;
- Working collaboratively on one repository.
Research Data Visualisation Workshop
The Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) will be running the Research Data Visualisation Workshop on July 28th, 2016 at the University of Manchester. If you create data visualisations and plan to visualise new data sets or would like to know about data visualisation toolings and uses then this is the workshop for you.