Looking forward to 2025 and beyond for Digital Research

Digital Research's 5 year strategic plan is coming to its mid-point, so what do we plan to achieve in 2025 and beyond?

The program is split in to five pieces, namely Support (people), HPC (High Performance Computing), Research Storage, General Compute & Sustainable Funding (money). They are all interwoven, of course, but let's look at each of them in turn and describe the list of work for 2025 and gain an insight into 2026 & 2027.

Support & Research Software Engineering (RSE)

At the end of 2024, we filled two positions in Research IT; two Trainee Research Infrastructure Engineers (RIE) (Munaf Hafesji & Nana Amma Adu-Brobey). We are planning to recruit one more RIE in 2025, plus three more RSE (Research Software Engineer) positions which are being funded by grant awards.

The RSE team was greatly strengthen in 2024 with three new members (Sorrel Harriett, Andrew Harvie & Joanna Leng) bringing the team under Patricia Ternes to nine and this has allowed us to take on some more work on research grants and also spend additional time helping researchers prepare grant submissions. These proposals are already starting to bear fruit in 2025, and we are hoping this will continue into subsequent years so we can further expand the team and help more researchers around the University.

We are also excited to be running some summer internships, funded by the N8 CIR, co-supervised by the RSE team and focusing on the N8 CIR themes: Digital Health, Digital Humanities, and Machine Learning. This is an exciting opportunity for Leeds undergraduates to tackle some real-world challenges whilst learning about research software engineering.

There is some work to be done behind the scenes, such as fine tuning the service catalogue and the support models and building some dashboards so we can better monitor and deliver the service to the Research Community. Mostly this is hidden from sight but does take focus from the team to make sure we get it right.

We have also ported the old ARC website to a standard template with the University's look and feel, and there is a major redesign of the website happening now, which should launch in the next few months. This will make the navigation easier and the information easier to find, especially for newer users of the service.

High Performance Computing (HPC)

2025 is an exciting year for HPC - Aire was formally opened on Feb 6th by DVCs Hai-Sui Yu and Nick Plant, marking an enormous increase in capacity over ARC3 which it replaces. Aire has 28x as many FLOPS, including 84 NVIDIA L40S GPUs which are designed for Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML).

The planning has started for Calder (formally ARC5) and we're on track to deliver this by the end of 2025. Calder will be even bigger than Aire, and follows in our new tradition of Yorkshire river names! We are tracking the usage on Aire so Calder can be designed to match the workloads being run now as well as emerging workloads, such as AI and high precision scientific calculations. The discussions with the user community are under way and if you have views, we'd love to hear from you.

Research Storage (RS)

Through 2024, Mark Conmy (Head of Digital Policy) and Sally Dalton (Head of Library Research Services) worked on a new guidance paper for research data. The paper was endorsed by the Open Research Group and the Research and Innovation Board and fills an important gap for researchers, allowing them to better understand how to classify and deal with their data throughout the duration of its lifecycle.

There is a separate blog about both the guidance and the new service here: Research Data Classification Guidance & Data Storage Service | Advanced Research Computing

For 2025, we are looking at a new research archive service with the plan of launching this in May 2026. There is often a requirement from research funding bodies for us to keep data for many years (10 years is common) and there is a patchwork of ways of achieving this across the faculties, schools and institutions. The service will bring a cost effective, simple to use and efficient way of managing long term data - or at least that is what we are aiming for!

General Compute (GC)

General compute is a generic name for a proposed group of services that cover the gap between a researcher's laptop and full blown HPC - not everyone needs the extra power HPC has, given that there can be quite a learning curve to get going on the clusters.

• GC is a user-agnostic platform designed to provide compute resources for teaching and research purposes.
• GC integrates with university systems in contrast to HPC which is segmented off and tuned for performance.

GC and the services inside it are not available yet, but we hope to have them available in late 2025 and we are running a pilot to ensure that the services are fit for purpose before releasing them to all researchers across the University. We'll release more information as we go through the pilot, but expect that we will want to have a much simpler way to run computationally intensive work, a remote Linux desktop and better support for containers.

Funding (money)

A question we are commonly asked is "Can I get my funder to pay for some storage, or HPC or RSE time?".

The answer is yes, but it isn't very easy to find out the answer, as we store the information in different places and it changes over time. Obviously this isn't ideal, so a major push of 2025 is to make this much easier to find and include in grant submissions. Research IT is working closely with RIS (Research & Innovation Service) and the major funding bodies, such as UKRI, to clarify the guidance and then we will publish it on our newly designed website. We don't have a clear date yet as to when it will be ready, but stay tuned and hopefully we'll be able to share it soon.

Current Guidance:

• Research Software Engineering
• Research Storage
• High Performance Computing (Aire)

Find out more

If you'd like us to come and talk to you or your school, institute or faculty, we'd love to share with you all the exciting initiatives we have planned for 2025 and beyond.

You can drop us an email at: d.r.baldwin@leeds.ac.uk & P.TernesDallagnollo@leeds.ac.uk or talk to your Head of IT and they can help arrange a session.

You can also check out David's 15 to 1 staff profile for some more thoughts on what we are doing in Research IT.