Dr. Wadud Miah from The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) will be running a Fortran Modernisation Workshop at STFC on 27^th-28^th October 2016. It is a completely free event and is open to non-STFC attendees.

This two day computational science-centric practical hands on workshop is aimed at Fortran programmers who want to write modern code, or modernise existing codes, to make it more readable and maintainable by encouraging good software engineering practices. Adopting good software practices makes codes more amenable to optimization and parallelisation, and the path to making it a community code a whole lot easier.

Earlier this year Research IT requested feedback on a proposal to implement a ‘core research application suite’ that would focus support, training and licence resources on a selected suite of applications chosen to offer maximum value to University researchers.

Many thanks to all of you who took the time to contribute to this review, your input was very valuable. Based upon the feedback received it is clear that there is demand for the implementation of a general data visualisation tool (e.g. Spotfire, Tableau) and we are now proceeding with an evaluation of a set of candidate tools with the objective of selecting and deploying such a tool later this year.

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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 19th 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.