Birmingham Environment for Academic Research (BEAR) ran their annual BEAR Challenge for students on 25-27th June.
The Challenge presented a one-of-a-kind opportunity for Uundergrad and Postgrad taught students to meet with and learn from some of BEAR’s suppliers including IBM, Lenovo, Mellanox, OCF and the Advanced Research Computing team.
Almost 30 students, split into six teams, took part in the challenge. The majority were Postgrad students although the winning team were all first year undergrads from Computer Science and Physics. There was also a great international contingent amongst the competitors.
Teams were given an exclusive tour of the Grange Park data Centre and there were talks from experts from Lenovo and Mellanox. Over the three days, they were set five challenges covering hardware and software and were given access to BlueBEAR, the University’s supercomputer.
Feedback from the students taking part was really good and the challenge gave them an opportunity to use systems and learn from vendors about high performance computing systems and techniques that they wouldn’t normally get.