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!”
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”
HPCwire award winners!
We’re really pleased to announce that again in 2018, University of Birmingham has won an HPCwire Readers’ Choice Award, this year for Best Use of HPC in Manufacturing! Each year the Advanced Research Computing team put in a number of nominations for these prestigious awards to help showcase the research using BEAR and HPC services … Continue reading “HPCwire award winners!”
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”
BEAR Challenge 2018
As the summer term came to an end, the BEAR team invited 5 teams of students from Computer Science to take part in a series of High Performance Computing (HPC) challenges. The event was designed to give undergraduate students access to the support and technical knowledge of the BEAR team, and to promote a career … Continue reading “BEAR Challenge 2018”
A wolf among Librarians in Barcelona
It has taken me a while to write this due to our team being in demand recently but back in February, I attended the International Digital Curation Conference held in Barcelona. I was there to present our poster (produced in collaboration with Library Services), on how we help our researchers manage their data and provide … Continue reading “A wolf among Librarians in Barcelona”
***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”
Data Security: A Hot Topic
On Wednesday 14th March we held the second in our series of Digital Research Conversations on Data Security. With the upcoming changes in Data Protection regulations (GDPR) in May on everyone’s minds, it seemed to be a popular subject to discuss. The majority of our attendees were from the Medical School, understandably as they deal … Continue reading “Data Security: A Hot Topic”
The Hacker Within
On Monday 19th March the BEAR team supported the launch of The Hacker Within (THW), a group designed to enable people interested in coding to share practice, skills and ask questions on research computing and data science. Having booked a room for 30 people, we were amazed to see a turnout of around 70 (and … Continue reading “The Hacker Within”