The CSF (Computational Shared Facility) and DPSF (Data Processing Shared Facility), the University's flagship HPC systems for compute and high memory work, have been steadily growing over the past 7 years. Approximately 4 million pounds have been invested resulting in over 10,000 CPU cores, over 1PB of scratch and 60TB of RAM being available.

Thank you to everyone who came along to the latest Research IT Club and especially those who took the opportunity to ask questions! The presentations are now available from the links below.

Research IT run a number of computational research platforms for The University, including the Computational Shared Facility (CSF) and the Condor Pool; we also help support the regional N8 HPC platform. Until now, all computational resources have been Linux-based.

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.

Within Research IT the Research Infrastructure team has a wealth of experience in building and supporting computational platforms, storage, VMs, Web servers and a wide variety of custom, local infrastructure for research groups.

The Research Data Storage (Isilon) is being upgraded to a new tiered platform which will offer greater data storage capacity. Preparatory work for the upgrade is underway and this will require Isilon to be unavailable on Saturday 10th December from 6am - 2pm.

Computing Insight UK 2016 (CIUK) will take place in Manchester this year allowing for networking between users / researchers/ vendors and sales for various HPC architectures. There is also a full day of presentations where Martin Turner from Research IT will be presenting on 'Building a bespoke system for combined HPC and 3D Visualisation.

Research IT is pleased to announce that a replacement system for the existing Research Data Storage platform (Isilon) has been procured. The new tiered platform will offer researchers greater data storage capacity and will also be faster and cheaper.

Registration is open for the upcoming third edition of the Emerging Technology ‘EMiT’ conference to be held on the 2nd and 3rd of June 2016 in Barcelona, Spain. Building on the successes of the previous two years, EMiT 2016 aims to continue to provide a platform to discuss cutting edge advancements in emerging computing technologies and techniques.