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.

We are looking for volunteers to help evaluate a number of general data analytics and visualisation tools to bridge the gap to more specialised software such as MatLab and Python.

Research IT have recently launched a new initiative to assist researchers at the University of Manchester – the eResearch platforms partner network.

The eTekkatho project, a collaboration between the Tekkatho Foundation, JISC, the Co-op, and the University of Manchester, is an ongoing service to deliver educational resources to the people of Myanmar.

Research IT is running a short series of hands-on training courses which provide skills for researchers to further enhance their research. For information on our courses or other training that we can provide, please take a look at our training catalogue or contact us.