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”
Category: storage
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”
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”
Syncing issues with working offline on the Research Data Store
We have had reports of researchers making their Research Data Store (RDS) files available offline (in Windows), which then results in problems for other researchers on the project as the data is not always synchronised properly between users. To prevent problems with data syncing, please ensure that you do not set your RDS to be … Continue reading “Syncing issues with working offline on the Research Data Store”
Research Data Storage Issues and Plans
Over recent months, many of you will have direct experience of some instability in the core storage that underpins most of the BEAR services. The Research Data Store (RDS) infrastructure is ageing and approaching capacity. The better news is that plans for its replacement are well advanced with the primary orders already with suppliers. We … Continue reading “Research Data Storage Issues and Plans”
Storage Growing Pains
As users of some of our services will probably know, we’ve been having issues with our storage services on and off for a while now. Firstly, we have never lost any user data during this and mostly for users it has manifested itself as slow access at times. At times there has been no access, … Continue reading “Storage Growing Pains”