June 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.
June has been a busy month for events this year, with a successful inaugural RSE Midlands event held here, we joined IT Services for their stand at the Sustainability Town Hall and we are just starting the BEAR Challenge for taught students – we were overwhelmed with interest this year and hope the attendees find it a worthwhile 3 days. We have also been busy promoting the IT Needs for Active Research survey and have updated our ‘About BEAR’ video (1 min) for any researchers new to the University on the ‘About BEAR’ webpage.
In this newsletter we cover:
- IT Active Needs of Research Survey – have your say!
- Sustainable Supercomputing – How Green is BEAR?
- A Case Study on Using BEAR Services
- Service Update: GPU’s on BlueBEAR
- Training Workshops – Spaces Available
- Coding Club – June Recording & July Session
- General IT Services Feedback
- Facebook Group for Mechanical Engineering Staff/Students
- In-Person and Virtual BEAR Drop-in Sessions
IT Active Needs of Research Survey – have your say!
In late May, we launched the IT Active Needs of Research Survey to hear your views on the computational services and tools available to support you at the University. The survey is sponsored by PVC Professor Heather Widdows and open to all UoB research staff and postgraduate researchers. It gives you an opportunity to influence the development of IT Services’ research services, support and training, including BEAR.
We have now extended the closing date to Thursday 30th June to gather more widespread responses, please encourage staff and research students in your area to have their say as well via the survey link here (10-15 mins for completion).
Sustainable Supercomputing – How Green is BEAR?
Last week we attended the University’s Sustainability Town Hall where we could be found on the IT Services stand, discussing our response to the challenge of delivering sustainable supercomputing. On our agenda for more than a decade, the major breakthrough for BEAR came with the adoption of direct liquid cooling in 2015. To find out more read our blog post on ‘How Green is BEAR’ by Carol Sandys, Head of Advanced Research Computing.
A Case Study on Using BEAR Services
One of our first BEAR Champions, Jason Turner, presented a case study of how he uses many different BEAR services throughout his research at a seminar held at the Institute of Inflammation and Ageing. Now written up as case study on our blog, you can find out more about how Jason makes use of BEAR to enable his research, including how he managed to transfer a 260GB file in just 7 minutes!
Service Update: GPU’s on BlueBEAR
This summer we will be:
- Adding two nodes with 4x NVIDIA A100-80 GPUs
- Decommissioning the IBM POWER9 nodes (the bbpowergpu and castlespowergpu QoSs) - these will be unavailable from July.
Please see our GPU webpage for information about the GPUs that are available to use on BlueBEAR.
Training Workshops – Spaces Available
We have spaces available on the following training workshops, and they are all in-person! For full details and booking links visit our website: https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/bear-training
- Software Carpentry - Git: 27th June AM
- NVIDIA - Fundamentals of Deep Learning: 29th June full day
- NVIDIA - Accelerating Data Engineering Pipelines: 5th July full day
- Introduction to Linux: 14th July AM
- Introduction to BlueBEAR: 20th July AM
Coding Club – June Recording & July Session
We held our 4th Coding Club session on Baskerville last week with Gavin Yearwood introducing the Tier-2 HPC system that is available for UoB researchers to use, including training materials available. Simon Hartley then went into more detail outlining some fascinating case studies where researchers at Birmingham have made use of GPU’s to accelerate their data processing. The session recording is now available from our Canvas course.
The next session called ‘Cookies n’ Code’ is on Tuesday 19th July and will be a workshop where you can bring a coding query along or work through online courses and we will have experts available from the Research Software Group to assist – booking is required via Eventbrite.
General IT Services Feedback
The End User Services section of IT Services is looking at the support it provides to researchers and is interested to hear your views - contact Mark Cockshoot at m.cockshoot@bham.ac.uk or your local Strategic College Partner (see below). Additionally, if you would be willing to join a focus group to discuss the issues and ideas, please indicate that in your message.
Strategic College Partners:
Facebook Group for Mechanical Engineering Staff/Students
Any staff or student interested in mechanical engineering is invited to join a Facebook group coordinated by Dr Adel Abdel-Wahab from the Dubai campus. The aim of the group is to help students, staff and professional engineers from all over the world to connect, as well as learn new knowledge and skills. For more information, please contact Dr Abdel-Wahab: A.A.M.Abdelwahab@bham.ac.uk
In-Person and Virtual BEAR Drop-in Sessions
With the relaxation of Covid restrictions we are now holding both in-person (see photo above) and virtual drop-in sessions. The in-person sessions are being held once a month in a public, visible campus location, 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:
- Via Zoom – Friday 24th June 11:00-12:00
- *In-person* - Wednesday 29th June 12:00-13:00 – School of Engineering Foyer
- Via Zoom – Friday 8th July 11:00-12:00
- Via Zoom – Monday 18th July 13:30-14:30
- Via Zoom – Tuesday 2nd August 11:00-12:00
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