Back in June we announced some changes in Research IT management. We are now pleased to announce that, following the recent open competition, Robert Haines has been appointed as Head of Research IT.

Our Research IT function is a key partner for many of the University’s research community and has never been in such high demand. In fact the demand has increased by around 75% over the last two years!

Angus Hearmon, as our Head of Research IT, has also seen his remit grow. To continue to meet demand appropriately, it has been decided to split the responsibilities of the Head of Research IT in to two roles.

New researcher or PGR student at the University of Manchester? Completely confused about Research IT? Come along to a drop-in session and speak to members of the Research IT team face to face!

We are pleased to say that the HPC business case to the Research Lifecycle Programme was successful! This means that we now have substantial funds to invest in research IT infrastructure such as computational resource, VMs, storage, etc and we need your help!

Have you wondered how to feed your views into Research IT? Have you wondered what the research input to Research IT is? How do we plan and take researcher’s views and concerns into account? To find out more about Research IT governance and who your School representatives are, click on each Governance Board name.

Research IT has been providing the SpiNNaker project with research software engineer (RSE) expertise to help them simulate billions of simple neurons in order to create brain inspired computing systems.

Research IT will be running a new full-day course providing an intensive hands-on introduction to version control using Git on Wednesday 6th July 2016.

The course is aimed at those who have no or little experience of version control. It will cover:

• What version control is;
• The main benefits of using version control;
• How to set up and work with a local repository;
• How to work with remote repositories using GitHub;
• Topics such as branching, resolving conflicts, merging and rebasing;
• Working collaboratively on one repository.

Earlier this year Research IT requested feedback on a proposal to implement a ‘core research application suite’ that would focus support, training and licence resources on a selected suite of applications chosen to offer maximum value to University researchers.

Many thanks to all of you who took the time to contribute to this review, your input was very valuable. Based upon the feedback received it is clear that there is demand for the implementation of a general data visualisation tool (e.g. Spotfire, Tableau) and we are now proceeding with an evaluation of a set of candidate tools with the objective of selecting and deploying such a tool later this year.

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.

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.

Do you develop research software?

The inaugural conference of Research Software Engineers (RSEs) will be held at the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, UK on 15-16 September 2016. The event will target research software developers and research software engineers at any stage in their career.