Research IT is part of IT Services but a very specialised part. It supports postgraduate, post-doctoral and academic staff carrying out research across the University. It doesn’t support day-to-day IT such as email or IT accounts, it is dedicated to specialised research services.
Hopefully you will have heard about Research IT and everything on offer at your PGR welcome event but if that was a while ago, or if you’re still a bit unsure, read on to find out about the help and support for your research journey at the University.
There are two main teams within Research IT – Research Infrastructure (RI) and Research Software Engineering (RSE).
Research Infrastructure (RI)
The RI team look after the hardware that makes research happen so if you need more computational power, they are the team to go to! The University has a range of computational resources such as a high performance computing cluster (HPC), a Condor Pool and Cloud resources available to researchers. The RI team can also help you get access to regional and national HPC resources if your research requires it. And don’t worry, you won’t be on your own in using these resources as the team will help you get up and running and will be there to provide support and guidance as you start your research.
We all know how important it is to keep research data safe and secure and we provide replicated research storage which includes a 35 day recovery system for lost data so if something goes wrong – don’t panic! Just get in touch with us and we’ll do all we can to help. (Please note that the University very strongly discourages the use of USB sticks/external USB drives/locally managed NAS servers and provides no support if they are lost or if they fail!)
In addition the RI team also offer a very popular Virtual Machine (VM) service which is great for research activities such as Twitter scraping, database hosting, Apache Tomcat, research group developed application build/test/host, ArcGIS, R/Shiny servers, etc.
Research Software Engineering (RSE)
The RSE team are a team of experienced research software engineers (RSEs) who work with researchers across the University on a wide variety of research. They can advise on languages and technologies; develop and distribute code for you and much more. The team have a wide range of expertise in virtual reality, GPU software, web and mobile applications, databases. They are a great source of knowledge and are available for a chat and to give advice and guidance to all researchers!
They also have an Application Support Team who help researchers use the wide range of research software available across the University. They can also help researchers who are using their own code. If you have an application that isn’t doing what you want it to do – get in touch!
Research IT Training
On top of all this, we also provide free training to University PGRs and researchers. A list of our current training is available on StaffNet but don’t worry if the training you need isn’t listed! We signpost to training from external providers such as the Software Sustainability Institute and the N8 CoE for Computationally Intensive Research (N8 CIR)
Keep In Touch
The best way to keep informed of all our news including training opportunities is to either follow us on Twitter or sign up for our monthly newsletter which contains RIT service case studies, events, training, service announcements and much more.
Also, check out the RIT blog or contact the team if you have any questions.