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.
Last week we attended the University’s Sustainability Town Hall where we could be found on the IT Services stand, discussing our response to the challenge of delivering sustainable supercomputing. On our agenda for more than a decade, the major breakthrough for BEAR came with the adoption of direct liquid cooling in 2015. Read on to … Continue reading “How Green is the BEAR? Sustainable Supercomputing”
[For sessions in May, June and July see here: https://blog.bham.ac.uk/bear/2022/04/26/further-codingclub-sessions-may-july/ ] We are setting up a Coding Club from January for researchers and staff at the University of Birmingham to help them meet the goal of the Software Sustainability Institute of “Better Software, Better Research” i.e. if the software is incorrect then the resulting research … Continue reading “New Coding Club Starting Up in January!”
We are excited to announce that researchers who use our advanced computing facilities have been recognised as award winners in the HPCwire 2021 awards! Advanced Research Computing is very proud to provide the BEAR computing facilities to support life changing research at the University, which has again been internationally recognised in these highly competitive, global … Continue reading “HPCwire 2021 award winners!”
The Open Research Forum event was a 4-event series that focussed on highlighting the opportunities of cross-discipline engagement with Open Science through practical examples presented by UoB staff and external colleagues. The event aired ( via Zoom ) through lunch time sessions over 4 days and covered Day 1 : Launch Event Day 2 : … Continue reading “Open Research Forum”
Update – 21st January 2022 11am The BEAR DataShare service has now been retired and you will no longer be able to login via the web portal https://beardatashare.bham.ac.uk. Any data synced to your computer via the BEAR DataShare Client will remain on your computer but changes made will no longer be synced with anyone that … Continue reading “BEAR DataShare : End of Service”
I was very grateful to make it to the 15th International Digital Curation Conference in Dublin from 17th-19th February, ahead of the current lockdown. A truly international spread of 300 researchers, Research Data Managers, specialist Librarians, Archivists and IT Specialists (see the Conference Twitter picture here) came together to discuss collective curation of data and … Continue reading “Bear spotting in Dublin at the IDCC20”
I am finding two things hard to believe right now. Firstly that the BEAR PGR conference was held a short time ago on 12th April 2019 and secondly in less than one year time, 2020 will be the tenth anniversary of the event. I thought it would be a good idea to have a look … Continue reading “Why Is The BEAR PGR Conference So Special?”
We welcomed a sell-out crowd to our fourth Digital Research Conversation on Tuesday 9th April, to discuss ‘Making Sense of your Data’. After some networking whilst munching on pizza and brownies, it was onto the talks and Nina Vyas from the Dental School introduced us to the use of machine learning for analysing microscopy images. … Continue reading “Making Sense of Your Data!”
Over the past few months we’ve had a number of service issues with BEAR and this is something we’d really like to apologise for – we pride ourselves on providing excellent services and recently we’ve not lived up to that. Sorry about this! 🙇🏻 I thought I’d take some time to explain some of the issues … Continue reading “Stabilising BEAR”
On Wednesday 7th November, we held our third Digital Research Conversation on Data Sharing amid torrential rain. After some well-deserved pizza, it was onto the talks and Aslam Ghumra from our team Advanced Research Computing started us off describing how the Research Data Archive has changed to become the BEAR Archive. Where previously we provided … Continue reading “Is Open Data Possible in the Social Sciences?…And Other Tips for Data Sharing”
