April 2022 Newsletter
Welcome to the BEAR Newsletter, bringing you the latest news from the BEAR team (Birmingham Environment for Academic Research), as well as other relevant computing and data-related news from both within the University of Birmingham and outside.
We have lots of news for you this month, including details on changes to how our services are requested, as well as good news for BlueBEAR users with an increase in job submission limits. We hope that you have a great Easter break and that we will see some of you in-person when we restart our BEAR drop-in sessions around campus.
In this newsletter we cover:
- Changes to Requesting BEAR Services
- BEAR Services Issues
- Increased BlueBEAR Job Submission Limits
- Coding Club – R Session Recording
- Access to Sulis, Tier 2 HPC Facility
- Staff Digital Experiences Insights Survey
- Data Access Statements
- BEAR Drop-in sessions – Virtual and in-person
Changes to Requesting BEAR Services
We have made changes to how you can request BEAR Services (including CaStLeS) via the IT Service Desk forms, along with changes to free vs. premium resources. These changes were authorised by the Research Computing Management Committee in late 2021. We have reduced ambiguity about whether you will need to pay for resources, and also removed the differences that previously existed for researchers in certain parts of the University (particularly life science researchers) – read our blog post for more information.
BEAR Services Issues
Last week, a series of planned switch upgrades revealed underlying bugs, which then caused networking issues affecting BlueBEAR, VM’s, and prompted a short outage in connections to the Research Data Store. It took two days to re-establish network connectivity and get BlueBEAR jobs running once more due to the complex, deeply rooted problem that had arisen in our highly interlinked systems. We apologise for the break in service but want to reassure Research Data Store users that the data storage itself was unaffected by the problem, it was a networking issue that prevented access to the storage for a few hours. The Architecture, Infrastructure and Systems group now fully understand why the problem occurred and have put monitoring checks in place to prevent the same problem occurring again.
Increased BlueBEAR Job Submission Limits
If you’re a user of our HPC system, BlueBEAR, then you may be pleased to hear that the limit for the number of cores in both bbdefault and castles QOS has been raised from 400 cores to 576 cores or 4TB of memory per shared QOS, to allow you to make more use of the system. This quickly resulted in us having 10,000 cores in use on BlueBEAR for the first time! See our page on BlueBEAR job submission for further information.
Coding Club – R Session Recording
We held our 3rd Coding Club session last week on R with two excellent talks by Bodo Winter and Jason Grafmiller. Bodo gave an introduction to R including reasons to learn and use it, such as increasing your employability as well as the reproducibility of your research. Jason gave a fascinating example of how he uses R in his research on the English Language to scrape Twitter data, analyse and then plot it. The session recording is available from our Canvas course and we plan to hold the next session in May. Find out how to sign up to the Coding Club mailing list in our blog post.
Access to Sulis, Tier 2 HPC Facility
As an HPC Midlands+ consortium partner, we have access to the Sulis Tier 2 HPC facility which provides CPU and GPU resources. The UoB’s Tier 2 facilities are available when a researcher requires compute resources beyond those available on BlueBEAR. We are accepting project proposals for the six-month allocation period, which will run from May 2022 to October 2022. For more information, please contact us via the service desk (‘Other BEAR Request’).
MATLAB Special Interest Group event
We are holding an online MATLAB Special Interest Group (SIG) event on Wednesday 4th May from 1-2.30pm. Our new SIG Chair, Meurig Gallagher, will be introducing himself and his research at the interface of mathematical modelling and healthcare. MathWorks will give a talk on the AI workflow in MATLAB and how to get started with AI techniques to build models from your datasets. You can find more details and sign up via our Eventbrite page.
Staff Digital Experiences Insights Survey
IT Services is taking part in the Jisc Digital Experience Insights surveys for teaching, research and Professional Services staff.
The surveys are an opportunity for all University staff to share their views on our digital services so that we understand the current staff digital experience, as well as the digital experience that our staff expect. Academic staff are encouraged to complete the survey for which they have the most feedback to give, or can complete both Teaching and Research surveys for a double chance to win a £500 Amazon voucher – deadline is 14thApril.
BEAR will be launching our own biennial survey in May, focusing on ‘IT Needs for Active Research’.
Data Access Statements
With changes to the UKRI Open Access Policy brought in at the start of April, all UKRI funded research articles must provide a Data Access Statement describing where the data supporting the publication can be found, “even where there are no data associated with the article or the data are inaccessible”. The Library have updated their webpage on Data Access Statements to reflect the new policy and included example wording.
In-Person and Virtual BEAR Drop-in Sessions
With the relaxation of Covid restrictions we will be moving to both in-person and virtual drop-in sessions. We hope to hold an in-person session once a month in a public, visible campus location (look out for our new banners!) but we will also hold virtual drop-in sessions via Zoom for those not on campus or who require specialist help, so that we can find a relevant member of the team.
Further details, including how to join the virtual sessions are available on our drop-in webpage. Upcoming dates are also listed below:
- Via Zoom – Tuesday 26th April 11:00 – 12:00
- *In-person* - Wednesday 27th April 12:00 – 14:00 – Main Library Foyer, ground floor
- Via Zoom – Monday 9th May 13:30 – 14:30
- Via Zoom – Thursday 26th May 10:00 – 11:00
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