In September, two undergraduate students came to spend a week experiencing work in the Advanced Research Computing team. You can find out how their week went below, as they describe their first-hand experience.
Our names are Sereya and Harry; we are Theoretical Physics undergraduates who had the opportunity of experiencing a week working in the Advanced Research Computing (ARC) team that deliver Birmingham Environment for Academic Research (BEAR). This experience was organised by the Researcher Engagement and Data Group who put us in contact with the DevOps Engineer, Leo Turnell-Ritson. Leo guided us through the task of building up a Command Line Interface (CLI) tool, which centralises a few scripts to streamline database access for those working with the supercomputer BlueBEAR. However, the week was not all work; we had the pleasure of meeting a few BEAR Champions, a tour of the data centre, careers advice from experienced RSEs and chatting with the friendly and knowledgeable ARC team.
We felt instantly welcomed into the team as Monday morning kicked off with an online meeting, gathering all those working in the Research Software Group, to overview their previous week’s work. It was fascinating to learn about the variety of projects happening and exciting to know we were soon to contribute. After this, Leo gave us the briefing of our task which, at first, felt daunting. We were introduced to using the Click library for developing the CLI tool, then a Django framework to query and manipulate the BlueBEAR database. Neither of us had any prior experience with these libraries so in the beginning, we struggled and had a lot of questions for Leo and the other Research Software Engineers (RSEs) in the office. Luckily for us, the entire team was incredibly helpful and encouraging, so we began to quickly pick up the principals of development. We learned a lot about the importance and usefulness of test-driven development; how essential it is in writing concise unit tests and what it means for good test coverage.
Midway through the week, we were invited to sit in for a BEAR Champion meeting and a tour around our on-campus data centre. A highlight was chatting with PhD students about their research; it was eye-opening to find out the range of subjects that can intertwine with HPC and gave us insight into the future years of our academic journeys. Later, we had the chance to talk to Adrian Garcia, the Research Software Engineering Lead, who took us through his career journey and gave us many snippets of advice; the most important piece being, ‘choose a career that aligns with your morals’. James Carpenter, Senior Research Applications Specialist and Manager, also found the time to talk with us about the structure of BlueBEAR and the history of using RedHat as its distribution. James told us that he had a music degree and how he went on to be involved with ARC, another example of a surprising field being intertwined with High Performance Computing (HPC).
By the final day of the work experience, we felt truly immersed in ARC and we successfully had our merge request approved for a “project delete” script. This felt like a massive achievement; especially when looking back on how we struggled to even submit the merge requests in the beginning, to now having contributed to the main branch of the project.
We are very grateful to have experienced a week that has given us so much inspiration, motivation and most of all confidence going forward in exploring curiosities within HPC. Hopefully, our paths will intertwine with BlueBEAR again in future.
We were really pleased that Sereya and Harry enjoyed their week of work experience with us in Advanced Research Computing. If you are interested in doing work experience with us, then get in touch via email (bearinfo@contacts.bham.ac.uk), and depending on team availability and demand for places we may be able to help.