Virtual Environments are a tool for isolating and tracking the software packages that you use for your work. Why is this useful to you? Let Research Software Engineers Douglas Lowe and Ann Gledson explain!

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.

The Institute of Coding (IoC) is a Government initiative involving universities, industry and professionals which aims to address the UK digital skills shortage. One of the key aims of the project is to improve the quality and relevance of digital skills education delivered by UK universities.

Earlier this month, Research IT provided training for the University's Regenerative Medicine Centre for Doctoral Training. The training was arranged by the Software Sustainability Institute, and was a two day Software Carpentry workshop. The instructors were Mike Jackson from EPCC at the University of Edinburgh and David Mawdsley from Research IT.

Each semester CodeFirst runs free community courses aimed to provide women with technical and digital skills. The courses are taught by volunteer instructors all across the country and this October they are coming to the University of Manchester.

They are looking for a diverse range of enthusiastic volunteer instructors for the upcoming autumn sessions. Instructors come from a variety of cultural and coding backgrounds, and include computer science/technical postgraduates, company based professionals, freelance developers, and university staff. All instructors work on a voluntary basis.

A number of training courses in research IT will take place in September to coincide with the start of term. The courses are open to all University of Manchester researchers (both staff and post grad).

And be in with a chance of winning £250, £150 or £100 of Amazon Vouchers!

The demand for visualization of datasets through the creation of meaningful and attractive representations of data, and to provide insight and greater understanding of data is rapidly growing. There are many existing applications, ranging from Excel to more sophisticated and complex software like Matlab, Python, R, Mathematica, and STATA.

From feedback, we have identified a need for an application that falls in between these two extremes and we would like your help in evaluating potential applications. This evaluation will help select an application for wider adoption across the University, along with training, support and central licensing.

We have selected Tableau, Qlik, Spotfire and IBM Watson Analytics for a more detailed evaluation by the community.

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.