Dear BlueBEAR users, We have taken feedback from our user base regarding the time it takes for GPU jobs to start and have made changes with the aim of getting your jobs to start quicker. The changes we have made are as below: Our reasoning in making these changes are: BEAR Portal is intended for … Continue reading “GPU and BEAR Portal changes”
Month: April 2026
April 2026 BEAR Newsletter
Birmingham Environment for Academic Research (BEAR) Newsletter April begins with the Easter break, bringing a welcome pause before an exciting new chapter for the Advanced Research Computing team. We are delighted to welcome a new Head, Dr Andrew Edmondson, to lead the team into its next phase. Alongside this, we’re also delighted to have two new Research Software Engineers joining … Continue reading “April 2026 BEAR Newsletter”
Research project: Exploring Julia for High-Performance Computing
This project was initiated and led by Dr Vincenzo Brachetta and carried out by PhD researcher Ritesh Moon at the University of Birmingham. Conducted between January and February 2026, it evaluated the performance and practical usability of Julia on BlueBEAR, the University’s institutional high-performance computing (HPC) platform. BlueBEAR supports multi-core CPU workloads, distributed execution across nodes, and GPU-accelerated computation, with … Continue reading “Research project: Exploring Julia for High-Performance Computing”
Understanding multi-agent learning through large-scale simulations
In this case study we hear from Tuo Zhang, a researcher working in Machine Learning, who has been using BlueBEAR to run large-scale simulations of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms. His research focuses on understanding how learning agents behave when interacting with each other in complex and changing environments. In many real-world systems, decision-making is not performed … Continue reading “Understanding multi-agent learning through large-scale simulations”
New Head of Advanced Research Computing
We’re pleased to share that Dr Andrew Edmondson (Ed) has been appointed as the new Head of Advanced Research Computing (ARC), which is also highlighted in a recent ARC story on the University Sharepoint. Many of you will know Ed from his previous roles as Deputy Head of ARC and founder and leader of the … Continue reading “New Head of Advanced Research Computing”