June 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.

Today we are busy starting the 2023 BEAR Challenge, hosting 50 undergraduate and postgraduate taught students for 3 days of challenges using Baskerville. We hope it is going to be a great event, check out our updates on Twitter and a full report in the next newsletter!

Last month representatives of the team attended International Supercomputing in Hamburg. One of our Senior Research Software Engineers, Dr Jenny Wong, tells us about her experience of attending a large conference in her blog post as part of our #BearonTour series.

This month we have some key updates and new events to share:

External sharing of Microsoft 365 files
Competition! Publications where BEAR has been used
RSE Midlands Coding Club event
HPC Mid+ call
Case study
Training workshops
In-person and virtual BEAR drop-in sessions

External sharing of Microsoft 365 files

After the retirement of BEAR DataShare, a commonly requested feature from researchers for Microsoft 365 has been to share files with external users via ‘Anyone Links’, without requiring an email address to be specified. We are pleased to announce that this feature is now available, find out how to use the feature in OneDrive and SharePoint via the blog post on file sharing.

Competition! Publications where BEAR has been used

We’ve recently reached 990 publications listed where BEAR services have been used as part of the research. So as we’re getting really close to the 1000 mark, let’s make it even more exciting and offer a BEAR prize bag for the 1000^th publication to be added, plus we will feature your research in a future case study! So if you have any publication, resulting (in whole or in part) from using BEAR services, log this by editing the project listing in BEAR Admin and the winner could be you! See our webpage on acknowledging BEAR for more details.

RSE Midlands Coding Club

We have two RSE Midlands Coding Club events coming up in the next few weeks:

Thursday 22^nd June 11:00 - 12:00 - Catherine (Cat) Smith - What testing taught me – approaches to testing code
Monday 3^rd July 16:00 - 17:00 - Neil Shephard - Pre-commit: protecting your future self – how to use this feature of Git

Details of these sessions can be found on the rse-midlands website or on Twitter @RSE_Midlands.

HPC Mid+ call

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 six-month allocation period that will run from August 2023 to January 2024. For more information, please see our website and to apply for time please contact us via the service desk (‘Request Access to a Tier 2 HPC System’).

Case study

In our latest case study, we hear from Allan Beltrán Hernández, Assistant Professor of Environmental Economics, who has been making use of BlueBEAR and the BEAR Portal to enable his research into estimating the impact of climate change on agriculture at the global level.

Training workshops

We still have spaces available on upcoming Python and MATLAB training courses in June and July. For more information and to sign up, see our training website.

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, 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 30^th June, 11:00 – 12:00
Via Zoom – Tuesday 11^th July, 13:30 – 14:30
Via Zoom – Monday 24^th July, 11:00 – 12:00

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