The COVID-19 outbreak now means that most people are working from home but how do you adapt when perhaps you don’t have the same equipment as you do in your university office? Ian Cottam offers some tips on working from home with virtual desktops.

The popular conference, Computing Insight UK (CIUK), returns to Manchester again in December with the main theme of "Computing the Future". Students who are interested in attending can submit a poster abstract which, if accepted, will grant them free registration to the event including the CIUK exhibition and full programme of presentations and breakout sessions.

vDAL is a bookable space in Research IT where researchers can access VR, MR, mobile devices and high-end graphics workstations for testing, prototype development and collaboration with Research Software Engineers. We are now pleased to announce the addition of the Microsoft HoloLens to our vDAL.

Data visualization, virtual reality (VR) and mixed/augmented reality (MR/AR) technologies offer exciting opportunities for researchers to explore and understand their research data. Prominent in the news and rapidly evolving, the technology is finally having a massive impact. Research IT has identified this as a largely untapped potential within the research environment and is now formally announcing vDAL - The Visualization And Data Analysis Laboratory.

One of our Senior Research Software Engineers (RSE), Andrew Rowley, recently helped to develop software for and launch SpiNNaker, a machine with million cores.

We have recently made some significant changes to our computationally intensive research (CIR) platforms, DPSF and CSF2. Find out what has changed and how this will affect your research!

There is a lot of activity in Research IT regarding investment in research IT infrastructure and the Research Lifecycle Programme. It can all get a bit confusing! We have put together a summary of the current position regarding investment and workshop outcomes which we hope you will find useful.

We are pleased to say that the HPC business case to the Research Lifecycle Programme was successful! This means that we now have substantial funds to invest in research IT infrastructure such as computational resource, VMs, storage, etc and we need your help!

We are pleased to announce that there has recently been a significant investment in the Central Shared Facility (CSF). Over 1000 CPU cores and 16 Nvidia V100 GPUs are coming online in the next few weeks and there is further investment to come in the next few months!

The next Research IT club will take place on the 5^th of June and will feature updates from our research infrastructure and software engineering teams. Our two feature presentations will look at how Research IT is helping to create new parallel computer architecture inspired by the human brain. There will also be a presentation from IT Services on the planned changes to staff and cluster desktops across the university.

The call is now out for the annual end-of-financial-year CSF (Central Shared Facility) procurement. If your research group has funds and wishes to make a contribution, this University financial year, to the CSF, please get in touch as soon as possible.

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED.

The next Research IT club will take place on the 25^th of April and will feature updates from our research infrastructure and software engineering teams. Our two feature presentations will look at how Research IT is helping to create new parallel computer architecture inspired by the human brain. There will also be a presentation from IT Services on the planned changes to staff and cluster desktops across the university.