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RITS Directors Report for July

By Tom Couch, on 15 August 2014

Each month we put together a report which tracks the use and performance of each of our services. July’s report is now available and you can read it in full here:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/research-it-services/docs/RITS-report-july14

Highlights for this month include:

  • The Legion HPC service attained a new record utilisation with 193 active users out of the customer base of 750 submitting production research jobs to the service in July. The Legion slowdown measure indicates the service is not highly contended and job wait times remain low.
  • Both the IRIDIS and EMERALD regional HPC services continue to be heavily used by UCL researchers. We have decided to expand our usage of IRIDIS. Starting in August UCL will enlarge its allocated share of IRIDIS from our current 43% allocation to a 60.7% allocation. This will provide significant additional HPC resources to UCL researchers.
  • Research Data also had a good month with a strong increase in active users – now well over 250. In addition the service is now actively used by 8 of the 10 Faculties. This trend is expected in increase as Paul AYRIS and Max WILKINSON are putting in place an awareness campaign for research, HoDs and deans outlining the Open Access and Research Data Activities.
  • The RITS Research Software development team was featured in an article (page 11) of the 23rd July edition of Research Fortnight. James HETHERINGTON was quoted on the value his team brings as an internal dedicated team of Research Software developers working closely with Researchers across UCL.
  • In a significant new addition to the IRIS service, the UCL research world map is now LIVE in IRIS. Users can go to the IRIS homepage (https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris) where one can find the main link to the world map. Users can hover over any country or use the drop down to get to a specific area, and then click on any country to see the actual research activities and follow through into the detail on these research activities within IRIS. This new IRIS feature provides an exciting way to look at UCL research activities and also demonstrates the incredible global reach of UCL’s research.

Gavin McLachlan, Director Research IT Services, UCL

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