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”
Our first Digital Research Conversation!
On Wednesday 6th December we held our first Digital Research Conversation or DRC to a sell out crowd! The topic was ‘Managing Data from Creation to Destruction’ and our aim was to follow the example set by the University of Lancaster with their Data Conversations where they encourage researchers to come together to talk about … Continue reading “Our first Digital Research Conversation!”
New Research Data Centre – Progress
The new Data Centre build is making steady progress. We now have most of a roof, a concrete floor and even some walls. It’s fantastic to see it taking shape after many many months of planning and negotiating, both justifying the case for a new facility to support research and investigating the underlying technologies to … Continue reading “New Research Data Centre – Progress”
BEAR: Thought for Food?
From Conception to Pathology, the Big Bang to its final echoes, all human life and endeavour is here…. potentially! The Birmingham Environment for Academic Research (BEAR) provides services and support for a whole rainbow of research projects across a multiplicity of disciplines. BEAR and the Research Computing Team are actively engaged in supporting hundreds of … Continue reading “BEAR: Thought for Food?”
Award winning projects!
We’re here to help support researchers at Birmingham and we’re really proud to have been supporting the CLIMB project over the past few years. This year, the MRC-funded Cloud Infrastructure for Microbial Bioinformatics (CLIMB) has been recognised in the annual international HPCWire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards, announced at the SuperComputing 2017 conference in Denver. The … Continue reading “Award winning projects!”
Building for the future …
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”