January 2025 BEAR Newsletter

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 … Continue reading “January 2025 BEAR Newsletter”

BEAR storage changes – 3TB becomes 5TB!

We wanted to update existing and potential future users of our storage about an exciting change coming to the BEAR Research Data Store! 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 … Continue reading “BEAR storage changes – 3TB becomes 5TB!”

Five years of BEAR Champions!

The BEAR Champion scheme recently reached its fifth anniversary! Over that time, we have had 33 BEAR Champions join the team and help us spread the word at the University of Birmingham about all the BEAR (Birmingham Environment for Academic Research) services that are available to support their research. As we enter 2025, we currently … Continue reading “Five years of BEAR Champions!”

Digital Research Conversations – Interdisciplinary data science

In our latest Digital Research Conversation, held on the 29 November 2024, research staff and students from the University of Birmingham gathered to discuss ‘Interdisciplinary data science: strategies for success’ in the home of the Institute for Data and AI (IDAI), at Elm House. Senior Research Data Scientist Dr Cai Wingfield arranged the event and … Continue reading “Digital Research Conversations – Interdisciplinary data science”

BEAR Challenge student teams compete in national Cluster Challenge

Two of the top-performing student teams from BEAR Challenge 2024 have gone onto compete in a national student cluster challenge. Online challenges began in October and culminated in three days of in-person activities in Manchester, where they competed with 14 other teams from universities across the UK at Computing Insight UK (CIUK). From the start … Continue reading “BEAR Challenge student teams compete in national Cluster Challenge”

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Graduate Systems Engineer vacancy at UoB

If you want to make a difference and are fascinated by how technology works, come and join a leading team responsible for supercomputing and allied services at the University of Birmingham! The Advanced Research Computing team that runs Birmingham Environment for Academic Research (BEAR) services is looking for a graduate (recently graduated or in final … Continue reading “Graduate Systems Engineer vacancy at UoB”

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HPC Wire Award 2024 winners!

For the second year running (see previous awards), we are pleased to announce that a research group who use our advanced computing facilities has been recognised as award-winning in the HPCwire 2024 awards! Advanced Research Computing is very proud to provide the BEAR computing facilities to support life changing research at the University, which has … Continue reading “HPC Wire Award 2024 winners!”

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2024 IT Needs of Active Research Survey results

We were pleased to see a 54% increase in responses to the Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research (PVC-R’s) ‘IT Needs of Active Research Survey 2024’ compared to the previous survey in 2022. Thank you to everyone who took the time to respond and to share their views. The Survey aims to understand the IT you need … Continue reading “2024 IT Needs of Active Research Survey results”

Upcoming maintenance in December and January

As part of the standard maintenance cycle, as usual there will be an extended shutdown of Birmingham Environment for Academic Research (BEAR) Services around the second week of December to carry out major maintenance. This year there are additional major pieces of work to complete which mean more downtime than in previous years: The complexity … Continue reading “Upcoming maintenance in December and January”

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Building professional skills via an internship

Back in Autumn 2023, we were pleased to have an intern join us for 3 months for their Professional Internship for PhD Students (PIPS) placement, as part of the Midlands Integrative Biosciences Training Partnership (MIBTP). You can find out what PhD student Kirsty McCready got up to in the article below. The MIBTP is a … Continue reading “Building professional skills via an internship”