– and it's Microsoft that could make it happen – with WSL2 (Windows Subsystem Linux 2). Find out more in this opinion piece by Research Software Engineer, Ian Cottam.

The next Research IT club will take place on the 25^th of April 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.

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.

The big news from Microsoft is that, from this summer, Windows 10 will support user-mode programs from the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution.