Research Support
For
Postgraduate
Students.
Corporate
Information &
Computing
Services.
CiCS Support for Research
Corporate Information and Computing Services (CiCS) provides a diverse range of computing services to support research.
We provide statistical software, programming software, modelling software and bibliographical software supported by a suite of training courses, an online research support forum and even one-to one consultancies. We are also exploring a number of ways to deliver research software to your desktop wherever you are.
For research that requires compute intensive simulation and analysis
applications we have a high performance computing facility. We offer a range of tailored training courses to help you get to grips with parallel and high-throughput computing.
Collaboration and data sharing is facilitated by the University’s 4Gb per second Internet connection. Our online collaboration environments connect you to your supervisor, library resources, research group colleagues and data whether working from home, on campus or at other institutions.
Many of our services for research are summarised in this booklet. To find out more please visit
Software
Statistics (Quantitative Data Analysis)
CiCS provides and supports SPSS for quantitative data analysis and predictive analytics. We also support AnswerTree, TextAnalysis, DataEntry and AMOS from the SPSS stable.
Qualitative Data Analysis
We provide NVivo for qualitative data analysis. NVivo lets you manage, shape and make sense of unstructured information such as text and audio to arrive at conclusions.
Bibliography Management
To manage your bibliographies, CiCS provides the EndNote software. This can import from online research papers and can insert formatted citations directly into your written reports.
Graphs
We support SigmaPlot graphing software, which helps you build exact graphs to present your work clearly and precisely.
Science and Engineering Software
In addition, the high performance computing facility detailed on the next page offers science and engineering software including Matlab, Maple, Ansys, Fluent and Abaqus.
Buying Software
In addition to the software listed here, we sell a range of research software at the Computing Centre. For a list of applications, available at low prices, please visit the following web page:
www.shef.ac.uk/cics/research/software
Courses
We deliver training courses on a number of research applications. All courses are free and are available to book from our website. Please see our training web pages for more details and links to downloadable user guides:
High Performance Computing
The high performance computing facility at Sheffield is called Iceberg. It has dual head nodes with over one thousand cores and is configured for high-throughput and parallel processing. Iceberg runs simulation and analysis applications that require much more compute resource than is available on standard computers and has a node dedicated to cutting-edge graphical processing units. We are also using cloud computing within the campus to expand the cluster.
To use Iceberg you must ask your research supervisor to email [email protected] asking for an account to be set up for you. Your supervisor should specify your name, course, computer username and email address.
For detailed specifications of Iceberg, see www.shef.ac.uk/wrgrid/iceberg
The high performance computing facility offers engineering, scientific, mathematical and statistical applications.
To help you get started there are training courses available on Unix, Linux, High Performance Computing, Distributed Computing, Fortran, C and Matlab.
For researchers who do not wish to learn the complexities of research computing there is a web based portal. It offers a choice of software applications controlled by forms, allowing researchers to submit distributed jobs with minimal IT knowledge.
Research students can also receive support in their research computing via a number of web-based support forums. For details and a list of forums see www.shef.ac.uk/cics/research/forums
Collaboration
The University provides a range of social and collaboration web 2.0 environments to help you connect to researchers distributed around the globe.
For research, we offer forums and flexible collaboration environments in which groups of researchers can work together to develop new ideas. You can even invite researchers from outside the University of Sheffield to join your research group.
Completed papers, reports or videos can be showcased in your research group’s public forum to raise the profile of your research.
You can also collaborate using Google Docs or any of the tools within the Google Apps for Education Suite which is provided for all staff and students at the University.
We also support a range of videoconferencing options from dedicated conference rooms to desktop solutions including GoogleTalk and Skype.
For more information about our collaboration services see:
The University is a member of the White Rose Grid e-science centre and has infrastructure enabling it to support collaborative e-research projects.
Iceberg is affiliated with the UK National Grid Service and the White Rose Grid. This enables researchers to provide collaborators from external institutions with secure access to data and applications hosted on Iceberg.
For more information on grid computing see www.shef.ac.uk/wrgrid
e-Research
Image from www.worldmapper.org
We are also registered with a number of research data archives. These provide social scientists and other researchers with access to a whole range of data sets from UK and European governments and academic institutions.
They offer a data storage facility and provide advice on research methods, preparing your data and data backup, with some resources aimed specifically at postgraduate students.
For more information on research data services see
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