Update 10/03/2023 We are still waiting for contractors to confirm but it is anticipated that the dates for the BEAR services shutdown will be from 9am on Friday 21st April until Tuesday 25th April at 5pm. We are expecting to restore access to the Research Data Store and Virtual Machines (which run bear-hosted websites) on Monday 24th April but compute … Continue reading “Extended BEAR outage in April”
Author: Stephanie Thompson
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 (or BEAR) team is looking for a graduate (recently graduated or in final year of study) to grow into a … Continue reading “Graduate Systems Engineer vacancy at UoB”
Machine Learning and AI use in Business & Economics
On the 24th November, Advanced Research Computing (or the BEAR team!) and researchers in the Business School and Economics presented a hybrid 1 hour session around the use of Machine Learning and AI techniques, in relation to their research areas. There was also a short demo on using the BEAR portal for Economics/Business-related software applications … Continue reading “Machine Learning and AI use in Business & Economics”
BEAR Champion team expansion!
In September 2019, we launched our BEAR Champion scheme to help spread the word about BEAR services, and the team has now expanded to 16 over all 5 colleges – see our list of BEAR Champions. In the last year, we have welcomed 6 new BEAR Champions – at least one from each College: Jack … Continue reading “BEAR Champion team expansion!”
IT Needs of Active Research Survey News – BEAR
Written by Carol Sandys (Head of Advanced Research Computing) & Stephanie Thompson Thank you to everyone who took time to respond to the Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research’s (PVC-R’s) ‘IT Needs of Active Research’ Survey (pdf of questions available below). Whilst the response rate was lower than in previous generations of this survey (with 173 responses) … Continue reading “IT Needs of Active Research Survey News – BEAR”
Call for Carpentries Trainers & Helpers
You may be aware that the BEAR team runs Software Carpentry courses on Python, Git, MATLAB and R with the assistance of a number of trained instructors from across the university. We would like to encourage more people to get involved as both trainers and course helpers. Carpentry Instructors Do you have experience of R, Python, Git, … Continue reading “Call for Carpentries Trainers & Helpers”
Using BEAR to build a database of global forest disturbance data
In the second case study for September, we hear from one of our BEAR Champions, Nezha Acil, about how she has made use of BEAR storage, data processing and our training throughout her PhD, based on studying global forest disturbance data… My name is Nezha Acil and I am part of Thomas Pugh’s TreeMort team … Continue reading “Using BEAR to build a database of global forest disturbance data”
BEAR: Maintaining Services when it’s 38C + Outside
If you are reading this, you probably know that we did not…. as we could not…. in the face of sustained temperatures beyond the design specification of the Research Data Centre. As with all engineering, there are safe operational limits and decisions are made about the conditions in which the system will operate. Similarly, air … Continue reading “BEAR: Maintaining Services when it’s 38C + Outside”
How Green is the BEAR? Sustainable Supercomputing
Last week we attended the University’s Sustainability Town Hall where we could be found on the IT Services stand, discussing our response to the challenge of delivering sustainable supercomputing. On our agenda for more than a decade, the major breakthrough for BEAR came with the adoption of direct liquid cooling in 2015. Read on to … Continue reading “How Green is the BEAR? Sustainable Supercomputing”
A Case Study on Using BEAR Services
One of our BEAR Champions, Dr Jason Turner, described how he makes use of the many different BEAR services to enable his research at a recent seminar for the Institute for Inflammation and Ageing, which BEAR were invited to present at. Read on to find out how quickly he can transfer 260GB of data! Jason … Continue reading “A Case Study on Using BEAR Services”