We are pleased to announce a £800k investment for local HPC facilities this summer, both for research and for taught Postgraduate and final year Undergraduate project students, a first for the University.

Research Infrastructure Engineer Daniel Corbett helped researchers from the Department of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science to successfully apply for time on ARCHER2, the UK national supercomputing service.

Research Software Engineers, Peter Crowther and Ann Gledson, have been working with the University Department of Mathematics and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine on improving their simulation model of contact tracing, which can be used to predict and explain the effectiveness of different strategies in reducing the spread of SARS-CoV-2

Ann Gledson, Research Software Engineer, is part of a cross-university team that recently won a University of Manchester “Making a Difference” award for the Manchester Urban Observatory.

The Research IT Edge Compute and Satellite Storage service was launched in August, 2020. Find out how we have been helping the National Research Facility for Lab X-ray Computed Tomography to establish a networked computing and data storage facility

A Safepod has now been installed in the University Library allowing researchers to meet security requirements whilst working with highly restricted data, confidential or personal information.

Members of Research IT are contributing to the current series of Carpentry workshops for researchers, postgraduates and staff at the University of Manchester, which was kicked off early in June with an online Library Carpentry workshop.

Back in 2019, two Research Software Engineers (RSEs) were co-authors on a paper which aimed to motivate users to reflect on their search behaviour, and to experiment with different search functionalities. This work has now been extended using data mining.

Our Mobile Development Service (MDS) has been working with School of Health Sciences PhD student Sewon Lee to assist in building an app on a very limited budget that allows hospital cleaning staff to log exposure to, and usage of, hazardous products in their role.

University libraries are increasingly hosting their collections online to reach a wider audience, however conventional web publishing platforms, such as WordPress, have been found to lack essential features that are required in digital collections. This is where dedicated digital collections platforms step in to provide the specialist set of technologies that would otherwise not be available.

Two of our Research Software Engineers have been working with the University eScience Lab on a BioExcel project to develop Conda packages for GROMACS making it easier for researchers to set up and run the software and to increase its reproducibility from computational workflow systems.

The University is seeking to gain a better understanding of both existing and aspirational use of centrally provided computational resources, for both research and for teaching and learning.