Research Computing and Data Community – RCDC
The Advanced Research Computing team at the University of Birmingham have been providing several different Special Interest Groups (SIGs) for researchers for many years, to enable interdisciplinary communities to come together with shared interests in particular programming languages, or coding in general. As these SIGs have grown over the years, so has the number of options for communication between members, and seeing that the University of Manchester have developed a successful community on Microsoft Teams, we have decided to amalgamate existing Slack and Teams groups into one, overarching ‘Research Computing and Data Community’, or RCDC for short. We hope that by providing channels within a single Teams community, this will aid discoverability and help promote the lesser-known SIGs.
How to join RCDC
It’s very easy to join RCDC – simply visit the RCDC Teams space and, if you are not already a member, a request to join will be automatically sent to one of the Teams owners, and should be approved quickly. Alternatively, in the University Teams desktop client or app, you can add the join code by selecting ‘Join team’ from the ‘New items’ button and enter the code ‘zo6528n’ (see screenshot).
Once you have joined the group, you can choose which channels to receive notifications for, allowing you to tailor content to your interests. To set notifications for a channel, hover over the right-hand side of the channel name and click on the three dots, then choose ‘Channel notifications’ on the pop-up menu. We do recommend browsing the channels though, to perhaps discover new items of interest!
We are currently in the process of moving over existing groups to RCDC, therefore not all are on the new group yet – you can find a full list of existing SIGs here, with links to pages for each group, including information on who leads each group, and links to relevant resources.
The following groups can currently be accessed via RCDC (as of 06/01/26):
- General – this will replace the current Slack group (UoB Research Computing Community) for general announcements and questions around research computing
- LLM HPC Research Group
- MATLAB Special Interest Group
- Python Special Interest Group – this is a new group which will be starting to run events in 2026 – Co-Chairs are Daniel Donaldson and Vincenzo Brachetta
- Sustainable Research Computing SIG – currently this is just a channel for communications around resources and events
Interested in setting up your own Special Interest Group?
If you are interested in adding to the groups on RCDC, please see details on the BEAR User Group page.