January 2025 BEAR Newsletter

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Birmingham Environment for Academic Research (BEAR) Newsletter

Happy New Year! It has been a busy start to the year, and we would like to thank all our BEAR users for their patience whilst we performed our annual maintenance in December, as well as an additional downtime period in early January to connect the new transformer and complete upgrades to services. The transformer work was completed successfully, meaning that BEAR services are once again protected against future power interruptions. 

Included in this month’s newsletter:

  • News on storage changes – 3TB becomes 5TB!
  • Three RSE posts in Advanced Research Computing
  • Research Software Group Annual Report
  • How to find our webpages
  • Call for BEAR Champions and team update
  • Baskerville Multi-GPU RSE Call – closing date 24 January
  • New Julia Special Interest Group – launches 22 January
  • High Performance Computing with MATLAB – 11 February
  • Call for interest in a Python Special Interest Group
  • Interdisciplinary data science event summary
  • UoB student teams compete in national cluster challenge 
  • Case study on using BEAR services to power social science research
  • BEAR drop-in sessions

News on storage changes – 3TB becomes 5TB!

Storage disks

We are pleased to announce that from Tuesday 21 January, the amount of free, secure storage that can be requested per research project increases from 3TB to 5TB! At the same time, we have decided to simplify the process by bundling the cost of the end-of-project archive in the initial charge, raising the cost per additional TB (for 5 years) from £110 to £150. Find out more in the BEAR storage changes blog post.

Three RSE posts in Advanced Research Computing

We are currently recruiting for three Research Software Engineer (RSE) posts in Advanced Research Computing (ARC); 1) Grade 7 RSE, 2) Senior RSE and 3) Senior RSE & Manager (closing date Sunday 16 February). These job adverts are currently only open for internal applicants but should be viewable from the University job site from 21 January. More details are available via the recruitment blog post.  

Research Software Group Annual Report

The Research Software Group Annual Report for 2024 is hot off the press! As well as describing the wide range of support available from the Research Software Engineers, Research Application Specialists and Research Data Scientists, the report features a range of case studies showcasing how the Research Software group has enabled research at the University and partner institutions.

How to find our webpages

With the switching off of the University staff intranet pages and move to SharePoint, our old webpages are no longer redirecting to the corresponding new webpage on the University webpage. Therefore we wanted to remind you that you can find all our webpages explaining the various BEAR services here: www.birmingham.ac.uk/bear and technical documentation is available here: https://docs.bear.bham.ac.uk/ For more details on the move, see the BEAR on the move blog post.

Call for BEAR Champions and team update

BEAR Champions meeting BlueBEAR

As the BEAR Champion scheme celebrates its fifth anniversary, find out more about the group’s activities in the last year and how you could join the voluntary team in our BEAR Champion team news blog post. We are particularly looking for BEAR Champions from the College of Social Sciences and the School of Chemistry. 

Baskerville multi-GPU RSE call – closing date 24 January

The Research Software Group has some staff resources for making better simultaneous use of multi-GPU HPC nodes and we have created a call to find the research groups at the University who might benefit. Expressions of interest do not need to be long, just make sure you tell us the key details we need – see the blog post on the Baskerville multi-GPU RSE call for more details (closing date 24 January).

New Julia Special Interest Group – launches 22 January

A new Special Interest Group (SIG) is launching in January to support researchers using the programming language Julia, chaired by Dr Vincenzo Brachetta. The inaugural introductory seminar will be on Wednesday 22 January between 12.00-1.00pm in the Teaching and Learning Building. No prior knowledge is required and people from all disciplines are welcome. Please register for your place via the introductory seminar form here.

High Performance Computing with MATLAB – 11 February

On Tuesday 11 February (13.00-16:00), Mike Croucher from MathWorks will be running an in-person workshop in the Murray Learning Centre to demonstrate how MATLAB’s parallel language works. Attendees will learn how to accelerate and parallelise an application using both CPUs and GPUs, resulting in orders of magnitude speed-up from the un-optimised original. For more details and to book a place see the Eventbrite page

Call for interest in a Python Special Interest Group

We are currently gathering interest for starting a Python Special Interest Group (SIG). Similar to our other SIGs listed here, the aim would be to bring users of Python together to share their user experience and knowledge. If you are interested in forming a leadership group to find speakers and topics of interest, then please get in touch with us at bearinfo@contacts.bham.ac.uk.

Interdisciplinary data science event summary

Back in November, researchers gathered to discuss ‘Interdisciplinary data science: strategies for success’ in the home of the Institute for Data and AI (IDAI). Case studies of how researchers had made use of pump prime funding for Research Data Science support were described and you can read a summary of the event in the Digital Research Conversations blog post.

In related news, congratulations to the eight projects that won IDAI pump prime funding for 2024-25! You can find out who was successful out of the 42 applications in the Institute for Data and AI Teams channel.

UoB student teams compete in national cluster challenge

University of Birmingham student cluster teams at CIUK2024

Back in December, two of our teams from BEAR Challenge 2024 competed in the national Computing Insight UK Conference (CIUK), finishing in the top ten. You can find out more about the highlights from their experience in the blog post describing the national Cluster Challenge

We are already making plans for BEAR Challenge 2025 (24-26 June) to train up a new cohort of students with skills in HPC in preparation for future careers in the area, and to tackle future challenges at CIUK 2025! If you know of any taught students (undergraduate or masters) who would be interested in taking part in the BEAR Challenge, they can register their interest with us at bearinfo@contacts.bham.ac.uk.

Case study on using BEAR services to power social science research

In this month’s featured case study, we hear from Shuyu Li (PhD student in Economics) who explains how support from the Advanced Research Computing team to use various BEAR services has enabled her to effectively analyse environmental policies using Machine Learning models. Have a read of Shuyu’s case study to find out more. 

BEAR drop-in sessions

We currently just have dates for virtual drop-in sessions but will be scheduling in-person dates for future months – check the drop-in webpage for updates, as well as details on how to join the sessions. Currently scheduled dates are also listed below: 

  • Via Zoom – Tuesday 21 January, 11.00am-12.00pm
  • Via Zoom – Monday 27 January, 1.00-2.00pm

Missed last month’s newsletter?

Find November’s newsletter here. Sign up to receive the newsletter direct to your inbox by joining our bear-updates mailing list here (UoB login required), or ask to join via email at bearinfo@contacts.bham.ac.uk