This year June came around again and it’s BEAR Challenge time! This is an event we hold every year to try and introduce University of Birmingham undergraduates and masters’ students to the world of High-Performance Computing (HPC). This year we attracted ten groups of students from across the university from computer science, physics, maths, and … Continue reading “Bringing to BEAR – Creating a Challenge for the BEAR Challenge”
Tag: data centre
Simulating DNA and its Interactions with Metal Compounds
In this case study, we hear from Samuel Dettmer (Chemistry), who has been making use of BlueBEAR and the Research Data Store to enable his research into the ability of metal compounds to bind to DNA structures. My name’s Sam and I’m a 2nd year PhD student in the Hannon Group in the School of Chemistry. My … Continue reading “Simulating DNA and its Interactions with Metal Compounds”
Extended BEAR outage in April
Update 29/03/2023 Our contractors and Estates have confirmed the dates for the BEAR services shutdown, this will be from 9am on Friday 21st April until Tuesday 25th April at 5pm. We are expecting to restore access to the Research Data Store and Virtual Machines (which run bear-hosted websites) on Monday 24th April but compute services, such as BlueBEAR and Baskerville, … Continue reading “Extended BEAR outage in April”
BEAR Champion team expansion!
In September 2019, we launched our BEAR Champion scheme to help spread the word about BEAR services, and the team has now expanded to 16 over all 5 colleges – see our list of BEAR Champions. In the last year, we have welcomed 6 new BEAR Champions – at least one from each College: Jack … Continue reading “BEAR Champion team expansion!”
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”
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)”
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”
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”
The Launch of Baskerville – a Tier 2 HPC system
On the 14th of September, 2021, we were excited to welcome visitors to the University from across the country to the official launch of our Baskerville Tier 2 HPC system, expected to rank in the Top 200 of HPC systems in the world. Invited attendees included our technology partners in the project – OCF, Lenovo, … Continue reading “The Launch of Baskerville – a Tier 2 HPC system”
Lights Go On in the New Research Data Centre
With enormous thanks to our Estates project manager, we can confirm that the lights have gone on in the new Research Data Centre. This means ‘all systems are go’ for the BEAR migration 17th to 26th May as previously announced. See the service impacts summary published on 8th March ‘Important! Extended Service Impacts for BEAR … Continue reading “Lights Go On in the New Research Data Centre”