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RITS Directors Report for June

By Tom Couch, on 18 July 2014

June was an excellent month for Research IT Services. We held our annual Forum event on the 17th June which was very well attended, including breakout sessions on IRIS profile creation, Research Software carpentry and a packed datacentre tour.

  • This month was a record for the Legion service with 180 of the 750 current active Legion users submitting jobs this month. The legion Slowdown measure, which is a quality indicator that measures the amount of time a researcher needs to wait for their job to be processed, has improved for the last four consecutive months. This is partly due to the recent additions to the systems coupled with a significant change in allocation policy from fair share to functional share. This policy change meant we no longer take into account past usage and queuing wait times to evaluate priority. The new scheduling policy is based on instant availability of resources, minimising wait times for infrequent job submitters. This is expected to reduce the impact of large job arrays on the system. Much thanks to Clare Gryce, the RC team and the RC governance group for their efforts.
  • The EMERALD and IRIDIS regional HPU facilities ran with a high number of UCL users last month with both services running at close to 90% utilisation.
  • Research Data also had a good month with a strong increase in active users – now approaching 250. In addition the service is now actively used by 8 of the 10 Faculties. In addition, UCL Research Data is receiving some excellent external and international attention with a case study published on the LIBRE website (http://libereurope.eu/committee/scholarly-research/research-data-management-case-studies/ )  – highlighting UCL as one of the world leaders in Research Data Management. Congratulations to Max Wilkinson, the UCL Research Data Team and the Library team that made this happen.
  • Note that we are now measuring the number of published articles in RPS differently: We are only measuring publications from research staff, excluding all other staff including teaching and professional services. Details are on the slide in this pack.
  • The IDHS (Data Safe Haven) service also showed significant activity with a large rise in the number of IG toolkit registrations and almost 600 staff members now trained on Information governance and the handling of highly sensitive or patient identifiable data. In addition, IDHS passed a significant milestone with the successful ISO 27001 stage 2 Audit from the 16th – 19th June 2014. Once accreditation is formally confirmed this will mark a huge step forward for this sensitive data facility and service.

Read the full report here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/research-it-services/docs/RITS-report-june14

Gavin McLachlan, Director Research IT Services, UCL

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