Working out the relationships between the twigs in the tree of life - with confidence - is a key goal for biologists and palaeontologists. It also provides computational challenges. Russell Garwood, from the School of Natural Sciences, explains what these are, and how Research IT have helped.

Our computational resources continue to hit milestones!

Members of Research IT’s Research Infrastructure Group have been working with the Proton Therapy research group (PRECISE) led by Prof. Karen Kirby at The Christie Hospital to improve clinical dose prescriptions in radiotherapy.

Find out how our Research Infrastructure Engineers helped a researcher from Division of Cardiovascular Sciences run a million R jobs on confidential data in weeks rather than months.

Thank you to everyone who came along to the first Research IT club of the academic year. If you were unable to attend, all the presentations are now available at the links below. We had some great presentations on how our RSEs built a searchable database for Alzheimer’s Research and the first case study of our Cloud bursting in action.

This latest instalment of our Top Tips blog posts is sure to be of interest to users of our popular Condor Pool. Ian Cottam, Research Software Engineer (RSE) in Research IT, has put together some handy tips for you to get the most out of this great computational resource.

There has been a lot of exciting news this month regarding our Condor Pool and its new cloud bursting functionality. The good news continues as the Condor Pool has recently hit a milestone of “5000 years” of compute.

The Condor Pool is a high-throughput computing (HTC) resource freely available to all researchers at the University of Manchester. The pool largely comprises of many of the PCs around campus located in teaching clusters. At night and at weekends, these are rebooted into Linux and used to run large numbers of computational jobs.

Research IT have developed and supported Linux-based computational resources for many years - both batch/queue based (e.g., the CSF, Condor Pool and also the regional platform, N8 HPC) and interactive (the iCSF), but up until now there has been no viable MS Windows-based service.