Girish Ramesh from the Textiles and Apparel Group in the School of Materials was one of the first users of our prototype Visualization and Data Analysis Laboratory (vDAL). He used the powerful machines to visualise hair as part of his PhD and also as part of the prestigious Google Summer of Code.

As part of the Data Science Research Partnership between BBC R&D and the University of Manchester, one of our research software engineers (RSE), Josh Woodcock, spent 3 months working with BBC R&D to develop a way to visualise click data from an internal trial of the Cook-Along Kitchen Experience (CAKE). Involved in the project were Jonathan Carlton (PhD student with BBC R&D and University of Manchester), Andy Brown (BBC R&D), John Keane and Caroline Jay (University of Manchester).

Research IT has recently been involved in an exciting new use case which aimed to help people with a chronic lung disease self-report the impact of their symptoms on their wellbeing and to view their data.

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!

Are you interested in using mobile devices, such as phones and tablets, for real-time, interactive computational fluid dynamics (CFD) – the simulation of fluid flow? If so then come along to our first club of the new academic year on the 11th of October! You can find out more about this and the opportunities that digital transformation could bring to the university.

Are you a new researcher at the University of Manchester? Do you know how to cost for the services that Research IT offer in your research grant applications? Come along to our Research IT Costing Clinic and find out more about our services, how to include them in your research grant application and how to cost for them!

Here at Research IT we provide access to a central copy of the UK Biobank 500,000 participant release of genetic data. This saves Biobank-approved projects huge amounts of storage and provides convenient access to the data via desktops and central compute platforms. A question we are being asked more frequently is whether there is a local UoM community in which to share user experiences and ask questions about the data and its analysis.

The Research Lifecycle Programme (RLP) scoping phase is drawing to a conclusion. Over the past six months there has been an intense period of consultation with the research and support community staff through workshops, one to one interviews, deep dives, and a Thought Exchange survey. The Thought Exchange provided us with a comprehensive insight of the ideas of the community from PhD students to professors and support staff of how they envisage future e-infrastructure data management and support.

Research IT offers a range of services to UoM researchers which need to be costed for in research grant proposals. From research software expertise to research sysadmins to research data storage and production of research websites – come along to our clinic on the 21st of June to find out more!

The next Research IT club will take place on the 5^th of June 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.

Thanks to a collaboration between the Multilingual Manchester research unit and the University’s Research IT group, students and citizens in Saint Petersburg will now have access to a Russian version of LinguaSnapp - The University of Manchester’s mobile app for documenting language landscapes.

The UK BioBank has now released an update to the full-release 500,000 participant data released last year. Specifically, updated imputed data (study id EGAD00010001474) is now available for use on the CSF, iCSF, DPSF and desktops.