Summary of BEAR Services affected BlueBEAR HPC : Reduced service BEAR Cloud ( VM ) : No service CaStLeS compute ( VM and Batch) : No service NOTE: Other services such as DataShare, RDS, RDA, GitLab etc will NOT be affected. Detail of BEAR migration (!) Just a ‘heads-up’ about the forthcoming migration of BEAR infrastructure … Continue reading “Important! ****Extended Service Impacts for BEAR May 17th to May 26th 2018****”
BEAR Service Outage/Disruption for Essential Data Centre Maintenance – April 12th – April 16th 2018
Summary [April 12th – April 16th 2018] IT Services with Estates engineers will be carrying out essential maintenance to the power supplies to the University’s primary Data Centre during the second weekend in April which will entail a total power down of the centre. Additionally, they will carry out the annual fire systems testing postponed … Continue reading “BEAR Service Outage/Disruption for Essential Data Centre Maintenance – April 12th – April 16th 2018”
BEAR Services Available during the Data Centre Migration
**Thursday 17th May to Saturday 26th May 2018** Affected Services A limited BlueBEAR service (the Linux HPC batch processing system), using the residual 1300 air-cooled cores. Additional restrictions will apply during migration to share the available resources fairly. Detail to be confirmed. CaStLeS – access to replicated storage/data only. VMs and Batch processing will NOT … Continue reading “BEAR Services Available during the Data Centre Migration”
The first steps of BEAR Software
I started at the University in November, having previously been a researcher (both PhD and postdoc) at a different university. I’ve moved from being the one asking IT Services for both services and support to the one who provides these to others and it has been an interesting, busy, and varied first three months. During … Continue reading “The first steps of BEAR Software”
Data centre progress
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 …”