“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion." ― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

The N8 Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research (N8CIR) has hosted the Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) retreat at the University of Manchester from 28 March – to 01 April 2022. Taking place online and in-person at the University of Manchester, the sessions gave the participants the time and space to fully-engage with colleagues across a variety of research domains. Most of the sessions were run in the format of panels, where each day focused on a theme. The covered themes included the DRI landscape, engagement, facilitation, leadership, and collaboration.

As a DSNE researcher working on Virtual Labs development and research, I attended this retreat to develop my professional skills, as well as to better understand the DRI landscape in general and more specifically in the UK. Attending in-person, there was a good chance to engage with research software engineers and researchers developing research infrastructures in the UK, as well as engage with UK DRI leaders and specialists.

Digital Research Infrastructure includes software, hardware, infrastructure and networks, and data storage and security systems. The range of facilities and services that exist across the UK to support research was first introduced, what is available, and answering the key question, how to access them. The usability of the software, systems and platforms that make up the DRI landscape was then discussed. An important issue for computer science research was brought to the attention of the community by Maria about the access rights given to researchers of computer science. Such researchers require a higher level of access – than just using the available infrastructures, to test different configurations, which is sometimes the core of their research and experiments.

The Facilitation panels focused on ensuring all aspects of the research infrastructure work well together. Panellists discussed how we ensure these already complex components work together and can be scaled to meet local, regional, and national research priorities. With the cloud seen as a quick and easy way to accelerate research without expanding on-premise facilities, panellists discussed the practicalities of public and private clouds and offered advice on how to access and experiment with the cloud, while leaving data and budget intact. In another session, the panel discussed novel technologies as an integral part of research, such as Bede’s Power9 CPUs and GPU acceleration.

The Funding Landscape session considered the funding that is available at both local and national levels. The panel offered advice on how to prepare a business case and some of the internal and external factors that will influence decision-makers. They also discussed how to influence and engage with consultation processes.

A final interesting session was on Stories from the Trenches, where there was a discussion around how challenges and falls can be instrumental in identifying new directions and approaches.

An idea developed by the participants to be taken back to their home institutions is to raise awareness of sustainability within DRIs. This fits with the green computing vision that is being developed within DSNE. Another strategy to be considered is to compare the carbon footprint of research work when run on CPUs and GPUs.

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