Update 29/03/2023 Our contractors and Estates have confirmed the dates for the BEAR services shutdown, this 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 services, such as BlueBEAR and Baskerville, … Continue reading “Extended BEAR outage in April”
Category: data centre
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”
BEAR Challenge 2022
After a two year hiatus, the BEAR Challenge is back! The popular three day event was held on June 21st-23rd and attended by seven teams of 3-5 undergraduate and taught postgraduate students (see below). The teams tackled a heady array of machine learning, deep learning, data engineering, parallelisation, and computer cluster design challenges using the … Continue reading “BEAR Challenge 2022”
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”
The Launch of Baskerville – a Tier 2 HPC system
On the 14th of September, 2021, we were excited to welcome visitors to the University from across the country to the official launch of our Baskerville Tier 2 HPC system, expected to rank in the Top 200 of HPC systems in the world. Invited attendees included our technology partners in the project – OCF, Lenovo, … Continue reading “The Launch of Baskerville – a Tier 2 HPC system”
The launch of our new Research Data Centre
On 21st June 2018, the Advanced Research Computing (ARC) team celebrated the launch of our new Research Data Centre. As the first purpose built, water-cooled, research focussed UK Data Centre, Data Centre Managers and architects of HPC systems were keen to attend and find out more about this ambitious project. The day had a technical … Continue reading “The launch of our new Research Data Centre”
***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”
BEAR Services Available during the Data Centre Migration
**Thursday 17th May to Saturday 26th May 2018** Affected Services A limited BlueBEAR service (the Linux HPC batch processing system), using the residual 1300 air-cooled cores. Additional restrictions will apply during migration to share the available resources fairly. Detail to be confirmed. CaStLeS – access to replicated storage/data only. VMs and Batch processing will NOT … Continue reading “BEAR Services Available during the Data Centre Migration”
Data centre progress
We posted a little while ago about the data centre being built to support research computing and storage systems, well since November this site has come on massively! First, the bad news, due to the snow and poor weather in December and early January, the project is a little behind schedule so we have pushed … Continue reading “Data centre progress”