Difference is good for us

A couple of other interesting things from this week. CiCS was instrumental in organising the 4th HPC@Sheffield event. A one day research computing conference exploring how high performance  computing can help solve global challenges in Physical Sciences, Engineering, Health Care and Social Sciences. There were presentations, posters, vendor displays and demonstrations. unfortunately I could only be there for the opening, but reports are that it went really well.

Yesterday morning I spent 4 hours in a room with a handful of people drafting something. How awful you might think, but no, it was really enjoyable. We were drafting an educational rationale for Diversity at the university. Along the lines of "Diversity creates a richer university experience because:" and then a list of statements. Why we should embrace diversity in all forms - not just the protected characteristics - gender, race, disability - but all forms. Difference is good for us - diverse teams solve problems better and are more creative. It's why we should try and recruit the best person for the team, not just for the job. Not always easy.

HPC@Sheffield

Sorry for  week off from blogging- been away to visit family in the Caribbean. I know,  it's a hard life. Can you imagine living where the beaches are this packed?

No, me neither.

Anyway back to work now. Here's a bit of a plug to start with.

In addition to the great work we do supporting learning and teaching at the university, we have a team at CiCS dedicated to supporting research, promoting collaboration, sharing resources and supporting high performance computing - all helping to further our international reputation for world class research.

To showcase the exciting work being carried out by Sheffield research groups and look to the research computing horizon we host a prestigious annual HPC@Sheffield High Performance Computing event. Organised by the Research Computing Advisory Group, the 2014 event, taking place in March, covers a diverse range of research interests with the themes 'High Performance Processing, Big Data and Visualisation'.

With a welcome from the Vice Chancellor, the event features presentations from leading Sheffield

research groups, an exhibition space for vendors including Matlab, Dell, SGI, Nvidia and Simulia, and a research computing demonstration desk hosted by CiCS. A key element of the exhibition is a poster competition which provides an opportunity for Sheffield researchers to showcase their work. 

HPC@Sheffield takes place on Monday 31st March and details on speakers confirmed so far are included in the full programme which you can access here, and you can reserve a place here.

I'm sure attendees will find the event useful and will be inspired hearing about innovative research ranging from the discovery of the Higgs Boson to the advances in evolutionary biology made by the revolution in modern genomics.

 

SSB, HPC and mobile printing.

Good Service Strategy Board Monday. Discussion about how we support some new services - always an issue as we don't seem to stop supporting any! New ones coming up including various things related to scanning including our student eFile project. No new projects to approve, but some project closures and lessons learned reports. Also talked about our Service Advisory Groups and how we communicate their discussions to the wider community.

Also on Monday was our HPC@Sheffield day, a meeting of researchers from Sheffield and our partner Univerities to showcase some of the work going on using the N8 HPC facility as well as our own HPC computer. Unfortunately I could only attend to delver the short welcome, but the programme looked excellent, so much exciting science and research going on.

We're also piloting a method for printing from mobile devices, something our students and staff indicated they were interested in having. This week we ran a workshop for people in CiCS to come and try it out. Will be interesting to see how and what it's used for. I must admit I print very little, boarding cards being about the only exception, and I know some airlines are already piloting reading them from your phone!

At the moment I'm at the Gartner Higher Education Conference, but unfortunately the hotel is suffering a major systems failure and has no reservation systems or wifi so communication is a bit tricky. So, not many updates from me at the moment as I'm reliant on finding wifi from somewhere else, but as soon as its fixed you'll see updates from the sessions.

Back to work and virtual humans

Happy New Year everyone, and welcome to 2013 - hope you all had a good break. I'm sure 2013 will be another successful year for us - lots to do, and we also welcome our new Assistant Director, Dave Surtees, who started with us today.

When we got back last week it was straight into a 9am meeting of the Steering group overseeing the review of our student system. We're looking at what we currently have, as well as a vision for the future,  but the emphasis is increasingly on process change, simplification and standardisation.

I've had a meeting with HR about the Equality Objectives project I was involved in last year, and particularly how we can change the way we recruit staff so that we more closely reflect the local population. Lots of things to try out, and an interesting pilot is soon to start for some of our ancillary staff.

This morning we had a Business Continuity Operational Group, where the main agenda item was looking at the recommendations coming out of the exercise I took part in before Christmas, where we had three teams working on three different simulated incidents.

Finally today, I and some colleagues went to talk to one of our academic research institutes, INISIGNEO. This is a really exciting initiative - joint research involving departments in the Faculties of Engineering and Medicine. They are using computer simulation and modelling techniques to predict changes in the physiological state of a person. For example the progression of a disease, or of treatment. They are building biological models of organ systems which will eventually complete the virtual physiological human. This is all very exciting (there's a press release about it here), and of course, it requires computing power, hence our discussions with them. We'll be working with them to make sure they get the right sort of processing power, and the necessary training and support. It's one of the reasons I love working in a University, listening to academics who are passionate about their research.

Research data, printing and HPC at RUGIT

Today I've been at a RUGIT, (Russell Group IT Directors) meeting in London. Slightly larger group than usual, as the Russell Group has welcomed four new members - York, Queen Mary, Exeter and Durham. So we began with a bit of an introduction about what we do, and concluded that we're a bit of a self help group - sharing information, having open discussions and collaborating. We have two sub groups looking at security and service quality, and as well as all of the RUGIT members we have representatives from JANET and the Russell Group itself.

Today we discussed several topics, the first being research data management. We all see this as an issue, and one that we've been talking about for a long time. The amount of data being produced and processed is rising rapidly, and with that comes the need to store it, and to curate it. The research councils now demand a research data management plan with all grant applications, and there is pressure to keep and manage data in a way that allows its reuse, which involves digital data curation skills including applying metadata. We have a draft Research Data Management Policy which is the result of a collaboration between us, the Library and Research and Innovation Services. Like many other universities we're looking at how we implement it once it has been finally approved. One of the areas we discussed was charging policies. If we charge, then staff will go off down to PC World and buy terabytes of disc because it's cheaper then what we charge, with no consideration of the extra services provided centrally including back up, mirroring, archiving, security, disaster recovery etc. If we don't charge, then it becomes a valueless service with no limits, which we can't afford. We need to get the balance right between value and cost. This is definitely an area where we're all in the same boat and there's opportunities for collaboration.

We also discussed printing. Most of us have a printing service for students, and have had for some time. Many Universities have already implemented a similar service for staff, and others, like us, are just in the process of implementing one. Despite the obvious benefits  - access to an improved service with faster printing, colour, A3, duplex, it being more sustainable, more cost effective, and the devices managed centrally - there is always initial reluctance. Staff are very wedded to their own printers. So, we had an interesting discussion about the barriers to change, and some of the cultural issues we have to manage.

Towards the end of last year, funding was announced for Tier 2 HPC (high performance computing) centres of excellence, 5 were funded, and we had short presentations from three of them:

N8 - Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Durham, Lancaster, Liverpool, Newcastle, York.
South consortium - UCL, Southampton, Oxford, Bristol
Midplus - Birmingham, Warwick, Nottingham, Queen Mary

All have been awarded several million pounds to establish regional HPC facilities, to improve research collaboration and to encourage business engagement. One of the things we discussed, given that the grants are for the initial capital and only one year of recurrent money, is how do we make this facilities sustainable? How are they to be funded when this money has run out? we will need to demonstrate the impact that they have had, not just in research and technological terms, but in collaboration and engagement with industry. It will be an interesting couple of years!

Our final discussion of the day was on benchmarking, Something we've been talking about on RUGIT for as long as I can remember, and it usually centres around how do we know we're comparing apples with apples,  as we all have different structures and services. Well, a small group of us is going to have a go. We'll see what happens.


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