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”
Category: BEAR Service
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”
Requesting BEAR Services – 2022 changes
In April 2022 we have made some changes to how you can request BEAR services (including CaStLeS), and also changes to free vs. premium resources. In this post we’ll set out some of the changes, and help you choose the right forms to use. These changes were authorised by the Research Computing Management Committee in … Continue reading “Requesting BEAR Services – 2022 changes”
New Coding Club Starting Up in January!
[For sessions in May, June and July see here: https://blog.bham.ac.uk/bear/2022/04/26/further-codingclub-sessions-may-july/ ] We are setting up a Coding Club from January for researchers and staff at the University of Birmingham to help them meet the goal of the Software Sustainability Institute of “Better Software, Better Research” i.e. if the software is incorrect then the resulting research … Continue reading “New Coding Club Starting Up in January!”
Open Research Forum
The Open Research Forum event was a 4-event series that focussed on highlighting the opportunities of cross-discipline engagement with Open Science through practical examples presented by UoB staff and external colleagues. The event aired ( via Zoom ) through lunch time sessions over 4 days and covered Day 1 : Launch Event Day 2 : … Continue reading “Open Research Forum”
BEAR DataShare : End of Service
Update – 21st January 2022 11am The BEAR DataShare service has now been retired and you will no longer be able to login via the web portal https://beardatashare.bham.ac.uk. Any data synced to your computer via the BEAR DataShare Client will remain on your computer but changes made will no longer be synced with anyone that … Continue reading “BEAR DataShare : End of Service”
Stabilising BEAR
Over the past few months we’ve had a number of service issues with BEAR and this is something we’d really like to apologise for – we pride ourselves on providing excellent services and recently we’ve not lived up to that. Sorry about this! 
I thought I’d take some time to explain some of the issues … Continue reading “Stabilising BEAR”
Deploying the largest IBM POWER9 AI cluster in the UK!
Researchers at the University of Birmingham are set to benefit from the largest IBM® POWER9™ Artificial Intelligence (AI) cluster in the UK, delivering unprecedented performance for AI workloads. Working with OCF, the high-performance compute, storage and data analytics integrator, the University will integrate a total of 11 IBM POWER9 systems into its existing high-performance computing … Continue reading “Deploying the largest IBM POWER9 AI cluster in the UK!”
***Extended Service Impacts for BEAR*** ****May 17th to May 26th 2018****
Latest News – Summary of BEAR Services affected BlueBEAR HPC : Reduced service BEAR Cloud ( VM ) : No service CaStLeS compute ( VM and Batch) : No service with a few minor exceptions (In each case, the PI owner has been informed). The good news is that All CaStLeS data will remain available … Continue reading “***Extended Service Impacts for BEAR*** ****May 17th to May 26th 2018****”
Lights Go On in the New Research Data Centre
With enormous thanks to our Estates project manager, we can confirm that the lights have gone on in the new Research Data Centre. This means ‘all systems are go’ for the BEAR migration 17th to 26th May as previously announced. See the service impacts summary published on 8th March ‘Important! Extended Service Impacts for BEAR … Continue reading “Lights Go On in the New Research Data Centre”