As the number and size of the services provided by Research Computing has grown over the past 5 years, we’ve steadily put pressure on the University’s data centres. The power consumption of CPUs have risen as servers are packed with more and more cores and, at the same time, driven by the demands of research, … Continue reading “Building for the future …”
Digital Preservation
What do we understand by ‘preserving data’? I recently went to a workshop / conference led by the Preservation and archiving special interest group, or PASIG for short (https://pasigoxford.org/) in mid-September 2017. It was the first time I had entered an area which seems to be the domain of librarians and archivist. I was slightly … Continue reading “Digital Preservation”
A student in Research Computing
I am an undergraduate Computer Science student here at the University, just starting my third year of study of a five year degree and I’m eager to get going again. I started work in the Research Computing team at the end of my first year and I have been ever-present since, working full time over … Continue reading “A student in Research Computing”
We’re Exploding
As an ambitious, research-intensive institution, the University of Birmingham’s vision is to inspire today’s brightest researchers to make a major impact on global society and to become the leaders of tomorrow. To support researchers in making this vision a reality, the University is committed to providing world-class facilities, including compute power, data services, visualisation and … Continue reading “We’re Exploding”
Research Data Network York
Last week I attended my first Research Data Management (RDM)-related event. It was the 4th in the series run by JISC called Research Data Network and it was held at the University of York where I studied as an undergraduate, so I was keen to see how the University had changed. The answer was ‘a … Continue reading “Research Data Network York”
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”
My first week in Research Computing
Although I am not new to the University (having previously been in Biosciences), I have recently moved into the very different area of IT Services. Instead of being the researcher, I will now be advising them and promoting specialist computing services. I have been impressed so far by the facilities available in the building; a … Continue reading “My first week in Research Computing”