Welcome to the first instalment in a series of “Hints and Tips” from our expert research software engineer and research infrastructure engineers with the aim of making your research that little bit easier to do! In this article Ian Cottam looks at how to transfer your files between the various Research IT computational resources if you use Apple macOS or Linux.

Are you a user of the national HPC service ARCHER? If so you may have seen their announcement about a significant break in service provision to allow for the installation of their new system - ARCHER2.

Two months ago the Research IT HPC Pool consisting of 4096 CPU cores of Infiniband-connected compute resource (all dedicated to true HPC work) went into production. Many researchers are already running jobs on this new resource which was delivered via Research Lifecycle Programme (RLP) Change Project Z: High performance compute investments. We are now pleased to announce the arrival of further compute resources which will be available to all UoM researchers by the beginning of June.

Come along to the Research IT club on the 4^th of June to find out more about a free service from POP (Performance Optimisation and Productivity) Centre of excellence in HPC. They provide free of charge performance optimisation and productivity services for (your) academic AND industrial code(s) in all domains.

As part of the Research Lifecycle Programme, The University of Manchester (UoM) has made a £1 million investment into computational resource to further enable research across all faculties and institutes.

Are you a Humanities researcher? Would you like to be able to repeat a simple computing task several times but don’t want to use your own machine to do this? By using the UoM computational shared facilities (CSF) you can offload your jobs to the high performance computing (HPC) facility. This will allow you to save space and resources on your own machine to work on something else.

Last year, we held workshops to gather input on spending Research Lifecycle Programme (RLP) funds on developing our computational resources on a year-by-year basis.

We are already looking ahead to next year, and feedback from our research community is important in making sure we have the right resources in place for the future.

If you previously used N8 HPC or any of the Tier 2 resources then UKRI would like to hear from you! UKRI currently have a survey available to users of EPSRC’s investments in HPC over the last decade including both users of the funded hardware and also beneficiaries of any HPC associated software investments (such as for training or software development).

Find out how a research group in the School of MACE are using our HPC resources in conjunction with those at The Hartree Centre, to help Unilever tackle business challenges and to develop new and better products.

The popular conference, Computing Insight UK (CIUK), returns with the main theme of “Research Computing Delivers” and also be four sub-themes of “Career paths - service provision roles”, "Working with industry", Applications science" and “Data science”. Students who are interested in attending can submit a poster abstract which, if accepted, will grant them free registration to the event.

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!

There are two HPC calls out at the moment – one for access to the EPSRC funded Tier 2 High Performance Computing facilities and one for access to ARCHER, a Cray XC30 machine. If you are interested in responding to either of these calls, we are happy to help with any applications, please get in touch.