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”
BEAR Challenge 2022
Update 15/03/24: BEAR Challenge 2024 – registration open! If you are interested in joining BEAR Challenge 2024 and are either an undergraduate or masters student, from any discipline, please see our Eventbrite registration page for details. —- After a two year hiatus, the BEAR Challenge is back! The popular three day event was held on … Continue reading “BEAR Challenge 2022”
How Green is the BEAR? Sustainable Supercomputing
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”
A Case Study on Using BEAR Services
One of our BEAR Champions, Dr Jason Turner, described how he makes use of the many different BEAR services to enable his research at a recent seminar for the Institute for Inflammation and Ageing, which BEAR were invited to present at. Read on to find out how quickly he can transfer 260GB of data! Jason … Continue reading “A Case Study on Using BEAR Services”
Further Coding Club sessions (May-July)
We’re happy to announce a further 3 coding club sessions, these range from building pipelines and using GPU’s to a workshop where you can bring in your issues, queries and questions. Our aim is to build a community of members of the University who would like to learn and share good software practices. We meet … Continue reading “Further Coding Club sessions (May-July)”
Requesting BEAR Services – 2022 changes
In April 2022 we have made some changes to how you can request BEAR services (including CaStLeS), and also changes to free vs. premium resources. In this post we’ll set out some of the changes, and help you choose the right forms to use. These changes were authorised by the Research Computing Management Committee in … Continue reading “Requesting BEAR Services – 2022 changes”
New Coding Club Starting Up in January!
[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 Researchâ i.e. if the software is incorrect then the resulting research … Continue reading “New Coding Club Starting Up in January!”
Jenny’s first week as an RSE at BEAR
Hi everyone, my name is Jenny and I joined BEAR as a Senior Research Software Engineer in December 2021. I studied at the University of Leeds and my background is in applied mathematics. I hold a PhD in fluid dynamics, and I spent three years as a postdoc in France investigating two phase flows in … Continue reading “Jenny’s first week as an RSE at BEAR”
HPCwire 2021 award winners!
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!”
Joining Advanced Research Computing
On behalf of Dr Ryan Pepper Since March, I’ve been working in the BEAR team as a Research Software Engineer (RSE). For those who are not familiar with the term, RSEs are effectively software engineers with either a background or interest in working on problems in academic research, who work with researchers to write code … Continue reading “Joining Advanced Research Computing”