The popular conference, Computing Insight UK (CIUK), returns to Manchester again in December with the main theme of "Computing the Future". Students who are interested in attending can submit a poster abstract which, if accepted, will grant them free registration to the event including the CIUK exhibition and full programme of presentations and breakout sessions.

vDAL is a bookable space in Research IT where researchers can access VR, MR, mobile devices and high-end graphics workstations for testing, prototype development and collaboration with Research Software Engineers. We are now pleased to announce the addition of the Microsoft HoloLens to our vDAL.

Come along to the Research IT club on the 13th of Feb to hear more about our brand new Visualization And Data Analysis Laboratory – vDAL and the launch of a new university wide service – Digital Image Viewer. There will also be updates on the latest news from Research IT infrastructure and Applications and Software.

The abstracts for the event at 3pm on the 13th of Feb in Rm 4.4 Roscoe are below and we ask all attendees to register for the event.

Data visualization, virtual reality (VR) and mixed/augmented reality (MR/AR) technologies offer exciting opportunities for researchers to explore and understand their research data. Prominent in the news and rapidly evolving, the technology is finally having a massive impact. Research IT has identified this as a largely untapped potential within the research environment and is now formally announcing vDAL - The Visualization And Data Analysis Laboratory.

One of our Senior Research Software Engineers (RSE), Andrew Rowley, recently helped to develop software for and launch SpiNNaker, a machine with million cores.

We have recently made some significant changes to our computationally intensive research (CIR) platforms, DPSF and CSF2. Find out what has changed and how this will affect your research!

As part of the Research Lifecycle Programme (RLP) we are looking at procurement processes alongside HPC provision. We know that many researchers at the University are already using Cloud provision and that many more would like to do so. However at the moment there is no official process in place to procure or access Cloud resources.

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!

Research IT run a number of computational research platforms for The University, including the Computational Shared Facility (CSF) and the Condor Pool; we also help support the regional N8 HPC platform. Until now, all computational resources have been Linux-based.

The university has recently announced a 5 year partnership with BBC Research and Development and seven other UK Universities to unlock the potential of data in the media. We are pleased to say that Research IT staff will be using their expertise in several areas of this important project.

Research IT have developed and supported Linux-based computational resources for many years - both batch/queue based (e.g., the CSF, Condor Pool and also the regional platform, N8 HPC) and interactive (the iCSF), but up until now there has been no viable MS Windows-based service.