Andrew Edmondson, Advanced Research Computing, has been identified as 
a ‘Rising Star’ of Birmingham Heroes, for his research into ancient texts. Birmingham Heroes recognises research that takes place at Birmingham which impacts on the lives of people regionally, nationally and globally.
As well as working in IT Services as the Research Software Group Leader, looking after BEAR Software, Ed is a current PhD student at the University. He is looking at the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM). This is a computer-aided method from the Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung (INTF) in Münster which is used to reconstruct the earliest surviving text of the New Testament and show how variant readings emerged. This technology is currently being used by The Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE) and others to produce a major critical edition of the Greek New Testament. This will have a significant effect on the text of Bibles in many languages all over the world through the next century.
High performance computing (HPC) and big data – BlueBEAR
Ed’s research seeks to identify and explore the relationships between the text of New Testament manuscripts by running multiple iterations of the MrBayes software on the University of Birmingham’s high-performance BlueBEAR computer cluster.
Ed’s research forms one of the Birmingham Environment for Academic Research (BEAR) case studies, and has also been presented at the annual University Postgraduate Poster competition.
Watch Ed speak about HPC at Computing Insight 2015
Ed presented his research at the inaugural Computing Insight UK conference in December 2015.
As part of the conference, the conference organisers also interviewed Ed for a brief YouTube video, where he talks about the importance of high performance computing (HPC) for a variety of users in different academic fields.
Questions?
If you’d like to find out more about BEAR Software, please email Ed at a.c.edmondson@bham.ac.uk.