The first meeting of the community is open to anyone involved in, or interested in, the creation of software for research. The meeting will provide attendees the opportunity to learn more about this new peer-support community and it’s plans for the future, learn about “Software Reuse, Release and Licensing”, as well as the opportunity to network with other community members from across the University. We encourage everyone involved with or interested in research software to.. Read more »

The Research Lifecycle Programme Delivers Again! Two months ago our HPC Pool — 4096 CPU cores of Infiniband-connected compute resource all dedicated to true HPC work — went into production. Many people are already running jobs on The Pool and this platform was delivered via RLP Change Project Z: HPC Investment. More new compute resources will be available within days! Through RLP Change Project M&K (Incremental Increase in Compute Resource and Orchestration), 20 state-of-the-art Nvidia.. Read more »

Do you have trouble setting up Linux/MS Windows in a VM on your PC? Do you find problems moving a computational workflow from desktop or laptop to The CSF or to AWS/Azure? Do you find managing R or Python modules a frustrating experience? A program works on your machine but not on your collaborators?

Last year we asked for your input — how should we spend RLP funds to develop our computational resources on a year-by-year basis? On those recommendations we are procuring: more GPUs some very high memory (RAM) compute nodes more capacity for the CSF and more Cloud-based resources We are starting the work for next year’s RLP investment early! What do you believe we should procure, to enable your research? Please come along to one of.. Read more »

A new computational resource is now available at The University of Manchester! It comprises 4096 cores of Intel Skylake all with low-latency, high-bandwidth, Infiniband interconnect. This new resource is intended to replace Polaris (the N8-HPC cluster) which was decommissioned last July. Our share of Polaris was about 750 cores, so this is a big compute capacity increase! Initially the HPC Pool will support jobs of up to 1024 cores. These resources are suitable for true.. Read more »

2019 Jan: Fixed Term Post Available in the RI Team! We are recruiting for a fixed-term position within the Research Infrastructure Team. The team manages, develops and supports a diverse group of platforms for the research community at The University, including HPC, HTC, VMs, storage and virtual desktops, and of course Cloud-based resources. We also help with research project-specific infrastructure (e.g., for clinical imaging facilities in CMFT). The successful candidate will have the chance to.. Read more »

We will be recruiting two people in the near future to The Research Infrastructure Team, within Research IT. These are initially funded until 31 July 2022. In particular, we are looking for one individual with significant experience in looking after research IT infrastructure (e.g., HPC systems) with a salary up to approx. 49k pounds. The team currently numbers 14, with one recruitment in progress, plus the above two in addition. We run on-site HPC and.. Read more »

— This post is now filled. — We will be recruiting two people in the near future to The Research Infrastructure Team, within Research IT. These are initially funded until 31 July 2022. We are first looking for an individual with good working knowledge of HPC systems such as The CSF and/or N8-HPC’s Polaris cluster, at up to approx 39k pounds. The team currently numbers 14, with one recruitment in progress, plus the above two.. Read more »

We will be recruiting two people in the near future to The Research Infrastructure Team, within Research IT. These are initially funded until 31 July 2022. We are looking for one individual with significant experience in looking after research IT infrastructure (e.g., HPC systems) with a salary up to approx. 49k pounds and someone with less experience, who may need training up, at up to approx 39k pounds. The team currently numbers 14, with one.. Read more »

This role will be based within Research IT, part of IT Services at The University of Manchester. Research IT is a dynamic and growing group with a remit to develop and support platforms (i.e., services and infrastructure) which are essential to an ever-increasing number of researchers: from modelling atmospheric dynamics to nuclear power stations; from finding biomarkers to better target drugs to patients, to simulations of the stock markets; and recently 3D visualisation of archaeological.. Read more »

CSF Reaches a Major Milestone The Computational Shared Facility (CSF) has now officially come of age — it has reached an awesome 10,000 CPU cores — with around 4000 cores of Haswell/Broadwell and a Skylake procurement coming up in January. The CSF began 7 years ago through a small University-funded core (£90k) around which it was hoped academic-funded contributions might coalesce. The core was ordered in November 2010 with the first contributions coming from Prof.. Read more »

Research Data Storage: Bigger, faster, cheaper! The Research Data Storage platform is being refreshed after a hugely successful five years. The new platform will comprise: Isilon as fast, Tier 1 storage, as now; EMC ECS as slower, but much cheaper, Tier 2 storage. Files which have not been accessed in some time will automatically be moved from Tier 1 to Tier2; this will be completely invisible to users of the storage. The new Isilon nodes.. Read more »

DPSF 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 platform comprises: compute nodes with either 256 GB or 512 GB of RAM, a /scratch filesystem of over 600 TB, and, of course, has the.. Read more »

Since April, we have added almost one million pounds worth of new hardware to the University Research IT infrastructure. We expand on how the money was spent — what new resources are available — below. For more information, please contact the Research Infrastructure Team at its-ri-team@manchester.ac.uk Relocation of platforms from the Kilburn Data Centre to Joule House As many users of our systems will know, we have recently been moving some of our computational platforms.. Read more »

Dr Egor Zindy, Senior Experimental Officer: Bioimaging My main job, as a Senior Experimental Officer for Bioimaging, is to help people analyse large sets of images or movies acquired on our microscopes. Typically, there are multiple conditions and multiple repeats to explore, and quite often these are processed independently. Also looking at how these images are processed, you will often find a loop scanning through all the pixels, processing one at a time, independently of.. Read more »

The Research Infrastructure Team If you have any questions about the items below, please contact the RI team at its-ri-team@manchester.ac.uk CSF Refresh The Computational Shared Facility (CSF) is the University flagship computational resource. It started life four years ago and is now running 1000s of jobs for over 650 users from 35 research groups representing all faculties. The CSF is getting a New Year refresh. This will secure the service for years to come. The.. Read more »

End of University Financial Year Funds? If you have, or expect to receive funds, which must be spent this University financial year (i.e. by July 31st) on computational hardware please contact us as soon as possible at its-ri-team@manchester.ac.uk Best wishes Simon Dr Simon Hood, IT Services Research Infrastructure Coordinator. CSF Update The CSF continues to grow! We now have almost 5500 cores including 36 new nodes with the latest (server-based) Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs. If.. Read more »

We would be very happy to give a short presentation on recent developments, as outlined below, in your faculty, school or group, followed by a Q&A session. If you would like us pay you a visit, or you have any questions, please do email us at its-ri-team@manchester.ac.uk Best wishes Simon Dr Simon Hood, IT Services Research Infrastructure Coordinator. It’s about the service, not the hardware! We look after an awful lot of clusters and associated.. Read more »

Nightly meteorological and atmospheric forecasts are now being run on the UoM CIR Ecosystem . The results can be seen at the ManUniCast Web site. Data is downloaded each night from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. The data is pre-processed on Redqueen. Then the main forecasting runs are made, also on Redqueen. Post-processing of model output data generates images which are stored on the RDS. Finally, a.. Read more »