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 Research Software Group. Before joining ARC, Ed was a professional software engineer and has degrees in Maths and Theology, and a PhD entitled “An analysis of the coherence-based genealogical method using phylogenetics”. Ed is an Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE) and currently serves as Chair of the HPC-SIG for UK Academia.
This follows the recent retirement of Carol Sandys, who led ARC for many years as part of a long and successful career at Birmingham. Carol’s contributions include co-founding ARC, developing the award-winning BEAR services, and securing the University’s first EPSRC-funded national supercomputer, Baskerville, in 2020.
If you’ve worked with ARC before, you’ll know how much expertise sits across the team, from colleagues building and maintaining our HPC and storage systems, to our Research Software Engineers and Data Scientists, to those supporting researcher engagement, data and training. ARC has always been a collaborative group – people who care about helping researchers solve real problems, whether that’s debugging a workflow, advising on data management, or supporting complex computational projects. The BEAR blog regularly highlights this breadth of activity—from case studies to student achievements—and it’s a great reminder of how much goes on behind the scenes.
Looking ahead
This is a particularly exciting time for ARC. The University of Birmingham has secured £18M of funding from UKRI to create a cutting-edge national computing centre that will help accelerate research and innovation across the UK. Hosted in our Park Grange Data Centre, the Baskerville National Compute Resource (NCR)will benefit researchers in every discipline. As part of this development, we are currently decommissioning the original Baskerville supercomputer and installing Baskerville NCR in its place.
Alongside this work, we continue to provide essential compute and data services for researchers at Birmingham – including our BlueBEAR supercomputer and the Research Data Store, and our growing Research Software Engineering and Research Data Science Services. We will be launching a new intranet site in due course, and you will always be able to find links to it and our other online content from our home page on the UoB website.
Growing the team
To support the new Baskerville NCR we are also recruiting several new colleagues – including the already advertised new Graduate Research Infrastructure Engineers and four new Grade 8 posts. There will be further posts to come – so keep an eye on our blog in coming the weeks.
A note from Ed
“Stepping into this role, my aim is to support the team so that they can keep doing the work that makes the biggest difference: enabling excellent research. I feel honoured to lead such a committed and talented group of people, and I’m looking forward to the exciting developments in store for a growing ARC over the coming months.”