Microsoft have recently launched a new community for Research Software Engineers (RSEs), Data Scientists, Data Stewards and System Administrators.

Microsoft are offering grants to support COVID-19 research, access to the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset and access to Azure Datasets including free storage and curation.

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.

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.

Applications are now open for the RSE Cloud Computing Awards program, supported by Microsoft. The goal of the program is to create a community bridging researchers, university stakeholders, regional teams, and national services, to better understand how Microsoft Azure can enable better, faster, and more reproducible research.

Microsoft Research is offering free, hands-on, cloud computing training courses for university faculty, researchers, and PhD students in the UK and across Europe. Whether it is big data, big compute (HPC), or analysing data streaming from devices for an Internet of Things (IoT) project, see how easy it is using Microsoft Azure to speed up your research.