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!”
Category: data centre
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”
Work experience in Advanced Research Computing
Back in May, two students from year 10 did their work experience within the Advanced Research Computing team at the University of Birmingham. You can find out how their week went below, as they describe their first-hand experience. Who we worked for During our week of work experience we worked alongside Dr Stephanie Thompson of … Continue reading “Work experience in Advanced Research Computing”
BEAR Champion team news
In September 2019, we launched our BEAR Champion scheme to help spread the word about BEAR services, and since then the team has expanded to 20 over all 5 colleges – see our list of BEAR Champions. In the last year, we have welcomed 6 new BEAR Champions: Dr Jack Sullivan from the Institute of … Continue reading “BEAR Champion team news”
Digital Research Conversations – Sustainable Computing
In our 9th Digital Research Conversation, held on the 13th December 2023, researchers and Advanced Research Computing staff gave us an insight into how and why sustainable research computing should be on everybody’s agenda. Kirsty McCready, our Research Engagement and Data Group Intern, led the event and provides a summary below. There is no question … Continue reading “Digital Research Conversations – Sustainable Computing”
Extended BEAR outage in April
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”
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
Update 15/03/24: BEAR Challenge 2024 – registration open! If you are interested in joining BEAR Challenge 2024 and are either an undergraduate or masters student, from any discipline, please see our Eventbrite registration page for details. —- After a two year hiatus, the BEAR Challenge is back! The popular three day event was held on … 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”