Birmingham Environment for Academic Research
Blog posts from the BEAR (or Advanced Research Computing) team plus guest posts highlighting upcoming developments in technologies, team news, events hosted or attended and other topics of interest related to advanced computing and data management.
In this case study, we hear from Xi Jia, who is doing a Ph.D. in the School of Computer Science. Xi has been making use of BEAR’s Baskerville GPU cluster to dramatically reduce the time it takes to train deep-learning models for medical image registration. I am a fourth-year PhD student, from the School of … Continue reading “High-resolution medical scans & Baskerville”
In this case study, we hear from Dr Catherine Smith, a Research Fellow and Technical Officer in the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE), who has been making use of BEAR’s code management platform, BEAR GitLab, to enable her to support researchers using online editing tools to transcribe texts. At that time the … Continue reading “The saving grace ( well on Git )”
On the 24th November, Advanced Research Computing (or the BEAR team!) and researchers in the Business School and Economics presented a hybrid 1 hour session around the use of Machine Learning and AI techniques, in relation to their research areas. There was also a short demo on using the BEAR portal for Economics/Business-related software applications … Continue reading “Machine Learning and AI use in Business & Economics”
In November’s case study, we hear from researcher Gabrela da Silva Xavier who has been making use of BEAR’s storage and data processing power for imaging and RNA-sequencing data, in both her research and teaching… My name is Gabriela da Silva Xavier. I am an Associate Professor based at the Institute of Metabolism and Systems … Continue reading “Covid made me do it….”
Written by Carol Sandys (Head of Advanced Research Computing) & Stephanie Thompson Thank you to everyone who took time to respond to the Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research’s (PVC-R’s) ‘IT Needs of Active Research’ Survey (pdf of questions available below), open between 23 May to 1 July 2022. Whilst the response rate was lower than in … Continue reading “IT Needs of Active Research Survey News – BEAR”
In the second case study for September, we hear from one of our BEAR Champions, Nezha Acil, about how she has made use of BEAR storage, data processing and our training throughout her PhD, based on studying global forest disturbance data… My name is Nezha Acil and I am part of Thomas Pugh’s TreeMort team … Continue reading “Using BEAR to build a database of global forest disturbance data”
In September’s case study, we hear from PhD student Daniel Fentham from Computer Science, who has been making use of BEAR’s storage and data processing power, specifically using GPU’s to accelerate his research. The project I’m currently working on is automated malware detection using Graph Neural Networks, which we’ve needed to create an entire pipeline … Continue reading “Detecting malware through AI techniques”
The BEAR conference has now been running for over 10 years and was originally created to give PhD students experience in running a conference, as well as provide a showcase for the fantastic research done on BEAR. With previous support from the Graduate School and our suppliers, we have been able to provide catering as … Continue reading “BEAR PGR/ECR conference opportunity”
In July’s case study we hear from Stanimir Tashev, a PhD student in Cardiovascular Science, who has been making use of BEAR’s storage and data processing power, specifically the BEAR Portal to enable his research… I have been a Ph.D. student in the Herten Lab (@HertenDirk) since 2019 and my project deals with single molecule … Continue reading “From Image Analysis to ThunderSTORM”
BEAR Challenge 2022 was a whirlwind of GPUs, AI and pizza! It was a great opportunity to showcase the computing power of the EPSRC Tier 2 Baskerville HPC system, and have the contestants tackle some real-world problems in Artificial Intelligence with Baskerville’s GPUs. To find out more about the challenges involved, read our BEAR Challenge 2022 blog … Continue reading “BEAR Challenge 2022 Winners Interview”