This article describes the existing Research IT Virtual Machine service and outlines our planned developments. For more information, please email its-ri-team@manchester.ac.uk Existing Research Virtual Machine (VM) Service (RVMS) IT Services already offer a research VM service. Through this service, VMs are offered to research groups: with a relatively low specification, such as one or two CPU cores, four GB RAM and 25 GB local storage; on which researchers may have admin/root privileges. A standard Scientific.. Read more »

The iCSF now has a graphics/viz. capability. This capability is based on three AMD GPUs and works with a new Research Virtual Desktop Service (RVMS) node which is tied closely to iCSF nodes: the network latency between this RVMS node and the GPU host is low; and bandwidth is high and uncontended. Furthermore, network traffic from RVMS node to users’ desktop is heavily compressed (the RVMS uses NX/X2GO). The combination of these features means that.. Read more »