December 2022 Newsletter
The Runtime Terrors team celebrating their third place at CIUK in Manchester
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.
Earlier this month, members of our Architecture, Systems and Infrastructure Group and the Research Software Group attended the Computing Insight UK conference (#CIUK) to find out about the latest advances in supercomputing. The conference was the culmination of a national Cluster Challenge, see below to find out how well the University’s own team, the Runtime Terrors did!
We wish all our BEAR users a very Merry Christmas and hope you have a good break from work over Christmas. If you’re looking for something computing-related to keep you occupied, then take a look at the Advent coding challenge, with a new coding puzzle available each day.
In this newsletter we cover:
- BEAR maintenance update
- Graduate Systems Engineer post
- UoB Cluster Challenge team success at CIUK
- Case study on GPU use in Engineering
- We Don’t Byte Coding Club
- Session recording on AI applications in Economics and Business
- Data Science for Social Good – opportunity for students
- In-person and virtual BEAR drop-in sessions
BEAR maintenance update
Earlier this week the team were working hard to make upgrades to our systems in the minimum time possible, so as to reduce the time that BEAR services were unavailable for. Firewalls, switch configurations and all BlueBEAR nodes were upgraded. Old equipment was moved out of the data centre to free up space for new Research Data Store hardware and 50% of Baskerville nodes were moved to a resilient power supply, in case of winter power outages. Power monitoring was also added to our systems and after testing, we plan to make this available to users, so that they can optimise their jobs for power usage.
Graduate Systems Engineer post
Do you know any final year students or recent graduates who are fascinated by how technology works? If so, then please let them know about an exciting opportunity to join the Advanced Research Computing team as a Graduate Systems Engineer – details in our blog post on the vacancy.
UoB Cluster Challenge team success at CIUK
Members of the winning team from the BEAR Challenge earlier this year, have been taking part in a national Cluster Challenge at Computing Insight UK (CIUK). There were a series of online challenges for our team – the Runtime Terrors – culminating in two days of in-person challenges at CIUK in Manchester. The team excelled in the in-person challenges where they were able to dedicate more time, winning Q Associates task and finishing in 3rdplace overall – an excellent result with only 8 points between 1st place and the Runtime Terrors. Read more about the competition on the CIUK Cluster Challenge webpages.
Case study on GPU use in Engineering
In this month’s featured case study, Dr Xilin Xia discusses how he has used the GPUs available on our Tier-2 system, Baskerville, to predict flood impacts from extreme weather.
We Don’t Byte Coding Club
If you are a Postgraduate Researcher (PGR) who is developing code, then come along to the ‘We Don’t Byte’ Coding Club sessions. The club meets fortnightly and is a new cross-college collaboration of PGRs aiming to help attendees improve their programming skills, through seminars and workshop activities. Find out how to get involved on the ‘We Don’t Byte’ webpage.
Session recording on AI applications in Economics and Business
Back in November, Advanced Research Computing and researchers from the Business School and Economics presented a hybrid 1 hour session around the use of Machine Learning and AI techniques, in relation to their research areas. There was also a short demo on using the BEAR portal for Economics/Business-related software applications for AI use – the session recording is now available via our blog post.
Data Science for Social Good – opportunity for students
Data Science for Social Good (DSSG 2023) is a 12-week summer programme bringing together some of the top talent from data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence, to work on real-world data science challenges and deliver positive social impact. Applications are now open for late stage undergraduate or graduate students, including PhD students, to apply for fellowships for DSSGx UK 2023, which will be held at the University of Warwick from 5th June to 25th August (deadline is 18th December) – see the DSSG webpages for more information.
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 being held at least once a month in a public, visible campus location (see our drop-in webpage for upcoming dates), 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. Planned upcoming dates are also listed below:
- Via Zoom – Monday 9th January, 13:30-14:30
- Via Zoom – Tuesday 24th January, 11:00-12:00
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