April 2023 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.
This month, we are continuing our BEAR on Tour (#BearonTour) series with a visit to Dr Kit Windows-Yule in the School of Chemical Engineering. Find out about the group’s research in the Bear on Tour blog post. On Wednesday & Thursday this week, the PGR Committee will be running the 2023 BEAR PGR Conference – we hope to see lots of you there to hear about the fascinating research being done using BlueBEAR. Read below to find out more BEAR news, including seven new posts available in the Advanced Research Computing team.
In this newsletter we cover:
- Reminder: BEAR outage April 21st to 25th
- Seven new posts in Advanced Research Computing
- Call for BEAR Champions working with qualitative data
- Apply for time on Sulis (Tier 2 HPC)
- RSE Midlands Annual Conference – 24th April
- CFD Special Interest Group sessions
- ARCHER2 training
- Case study on using BlueBEAR to unravel the secrets of viscous fluids
- In-person and virtual BEAR drop-in sessions
Reminder: BEAR outage April 21st to 25th
Just a reminder about the BEAR services shutdown this week from 9am on Friday 21st April until Tuesday 25th April at 5pm. For further details, please see our blog post on the extended BEAR outage here. The team have been busy supporting the contractors to get the three new adiabatic coolers in place and operational – you can see pictures from the installation posted on Twitter.
Seven new posts in Advanced Research Computing
Thanks to recent success, the Advanced Research Computing team that supports BEAR services is growing and now recruiting to 7 new posts. Three of these posts are to launch a new Research Data Science service, as part of the Research Software Group. These senior Research Data Science posts are 5 year fixed term contracts and would be suited to researchers who have expert knowledge and skills in analysis, visualisation and extracting knowledge from all kinds of research data. Find out more in our blog post on seven brand new posts in Advanced Research Computing.
Call for BEAR Champions working with qualitative data
Due to the recent departure from the university of one of our BEAR Champions, we are currently looking for a researcher who works with qualitative data to join our voluntary team and support us in spreading the word about the secure storage available, as well as feeding back on the needs of researchers in their area. If you work with interview data and could spare an hour per month to meet with fellow researchers in the BEAR Champion team, then please get in touch with Stephanie Thompson (email s.e.m.thompson@bham.ac.uk) or find out more about the role in our blog post about the BEAR Champion team.
Apply for time on Sulis (Tier 2 HPC)
As an HPC Midlands+ consortium partner, we have access to the Sulis Tier 2 HPC facility, which provides CPU and GPU resources. The Tier 2 facilities are available when a researcher requires compute resources to supplement those available on BlueBEAR. We are accepting project proposals for the Sulis three-month allocation period that will run from May 2023 to July 2023. For more information, please see the Tier 2 facilities webpages and to apply for time please contact us via the service desk: Request Access to a Tier 2 HPC System.
RSE Midlands Annual Conference – 24th April
There is no RSE Midlands Coding Club session this month, as they are meeting in-person for the second RSE Midlands Annual Conference, to be held at the University of Nottingham on Monday 24th April. This year’s conference is a chance to build community, meet new and old friends, and learn more about the incredible breadth of skills RSEs in the Midlands possess. Find out more on the 2023 Annual Conference webpage and book your free ticket to attend.
CFD Special Interest Group sessions
The Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Special Interest Group (SIG) at the university are meeting for another two upcoming seminars (for full details see the blog post on the CFD SIG):
- On Friday 28th April between 9.30am and 12pm, Mark Keating from Flow Science will be presenting an introduction and workshop on Flow3D HYDRO. This workshop will be held in-person in the Learning Centre, room UG08.
- On Friday 9th June between 10am-12pm, Chair of the SIG, Dr Bruño Fraga from the School of Engineering will be presenting Multiflow3D: an introduction to an in-house CFD solver. This session will be held in-person in the School of Engineering, room 127.
ARCHER2 training
Did you know that ARCHER2, the UK National Supercomputing Service, offers a range of free face-to-face and online training courses, plus previous course recordings and materials? Topics covered include Message-Passing Programming with MPI, Fortran, VASP, LAMMPS, GROMACS and Modern C++ for Computational Scientists. Full details and booking information can be found on the ARCHER2 website.
Case study on using BlueBEAR to unravel the secrets of viscous fluids
In this month’s featured case study, Roberto Hart-Villamil (EngD student from Chemical Engineering) explains how he has used our supercomputer BlueBEAR to enable him to study viscous fluids. Ever packed your favourite cream for a vacation in a tropical paradise, only to discover it’s turned into an unrecognizable goo? Temperature sensitivity affects many everyday products, posing challenges for engineers and manufacturers, for which Roberto is using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations run on BlueBEAR to solve.
In-person and virtual BEAR drop-in sessions
We are currently holding both in-person and virtual drop-in sessions. In-person drop-ins are held at least once a month in a variety of campus locations, with additional 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:
- In-person – Thursday 20th April, 13:00 – 14:00, Gisbert Kapp, room NG08 (BEAR PGR Conference stand)
- Via Zoom – Tuesday 18th April, 13:30 – 14:30
- Via Zoom – Friday 5th May, 11:00 – 12:00
- Via Zoom – Thursday 18th May, 09:30 – 10:30
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