Over the three days of 24-26 June, we welcomed 90 undergraduate and postgraduate taught students to #BEARChallenge2025. In an attempt to meet demand for places, this year we expanded to allow 15 teams but demand also rose at a pace, with 31 teams registering their interest! It is great to see the level of interest … Continue reading “BEAR Challenge 2025”
Author: Stephanie Thompson
RSE Midlands 2025
Senior Research Software Engineers James Tyrrell and Gavin Yearwood led the organisation of RSE Midlands 2025, and below James gives a summary of this successful event. The Advanced Research Computing team hosted the Research Software Engineering (RSE) Midlands 2025 Annual Conference at The Exchange on Monday 7 April, 2025. Sponsored and supported by our partners … Continue reading “RSE Midlands 2025”
SSI Research Software Maintenance Fund
The Software Sustainability Institute recently announced that they’ll be running the first Research Software Maintenance Fund. The scheme will offer up to £500k for two years or up to £150k for one year “to support and maintain existing research software or sustain a team responsible for multiple software tools”. The closing date for Expressions Of … Continue reading “SSI Research Software Maintenance Fund”
Planned work to improve resilience of the Research Data Store
Users of the Research Data Store (RDS) may have noticed intermittent performance issues affecting storage recently, which has been causing some disruption to users. This work is a necessary precursor to a major program of work in which we will replace, expand and enhance, the RDS service. Phase 1 Between now and summer 2025 we … Continue reading “Planned work to improve resilience of the Research Data Store”
OpenFOAM workshop series – spring 2025
Join our OpenFOAM Workshop Series (Spring 2025), a hands-on training program taking you from basic usage to advanced programming in open-source CFD! It will be organised by Dr Chandan Bose under the umbrella of the Birmingham Environment for Academic Research (BEAR) OpenFOAM SIG and the EPSRC IAA-funded Community of Practice – Open-Source Codes and Software Impact. This series is perfect … Continue reading “OpenFOAM workshop series – spring 2025”
IDAI ‘Pump Prime Funding’ spotlight
In Advanced Research Computing, we collaborate closely with the Institute for Data and AI (IDAI) and will be featuring a series of guest posts by Joshua Panteli, who has several roles at the University of Birmingham, as Project Manager for IDAI and the Birmingham Institute for Sustainability and Climate Action (BISCA), as well as being … Continue reading “IDAI ‘Pump Prime Funding’ spotlight”
‘Data and AI for researchers’ at the University’s first Data Conference
On Wednesday 26 February, the University’s inaugural Data Conference was held. With a series of talks and interactive sessions covering advice and tips on handling data, and a focus on building a community of data professionals, we ran a session in collaboration with the Institute for Data and AI entitled ‘Research and AI for researchers’. … Continue reading “‘Data and AI for researchers’ at the University’s first Data Conference”
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!”