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.

The University end of financial year is rapidly approaching and, as usual, Research IT anticipates making a procurement for the Central Shared Facility (CSF) and other Research Infrastructure platforms, such as the DPSF and iCSF, at this time. Thank you to those researchers who have already committed funds!

PRACE has recently announced its 15^th Call for Proposals for Project Access. The current call provides access to various European Tier 0 systems from Bull, Cray, Lenovo and IBM. These comprise a mixture of standard x86, Knights Landing and GPU platforms. Joint submissions from academia and industry are particularly welcome.

Research IT offers a range of services to UoM researchers such as high performance computing and software consultancy but how do you know if these services are relevant to you and your research? If they are how do you describe them and cost them correctly in your grant proposal?

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.

Research IT are launching a new series of sessions where you can discover more about Research IT, the skills and services that we offer and, importantly, how to include them in your grant proposals.

We are launching a new bimonthly club which aims to keep researchers at the University of Manchester up to date with the activities of Research IT. This will be our opportunity to share with you announcements of new services and training opportunities and give you the opportunity to feedback to us. The club will also provide a platform for researchers to share their knowledge and best practice in research IT with others from across the university and to promote cross-collaboration between research groups.

The Data-Processing Shared Facility (DPSF) is now available to early-adopters. The DPSF is a new computational platform (developed from Hydra) which is complementary to the highly-successful Computational Shared Facility (CSF) which has been in production for several years: The DPSF is specified for high-memory and IO-intensive work.

For important security-related reasons, University of Manchester computational platforms are not accessible directly from outside the campus, nor can UoM platforms directly access Web and FTP sites which are off-campus.

The University end of financial year is not far away! As usual, Research IT anticipate making a procurement for the Computational Shared Facility (CSF) and other Research Infrastructure platforms at this time.

By the time you read this, there will be 96 Infiniband-connected Intel Haswell-based nodes in the Computational Shared Facility (CSF), equivalent to over 2,300 cores. The CSF total core count will be over 8,000.