May 2022 Newsletter

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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 pleased to welcome the new Architecture, Infrastructure and Systems Group Leader – Jon Wakelin joins us from the University of Leicester and will be helping us maintain and develop the infrastructure that supports BEAR Services. In related news, we’ve had to update our infographic illustrating the ‘BEAR facts’ to reflect the growth in infrastructure over the last few years - (Twitter link here). We’ve got some exciting events coming up over the next few months with RSE Midlands having their inaugural meeting here, three planned sessions for the Coding Club and we invite undergraduate and postgraduate taught students to join us for the BEAR Challenge.    

In this newsletter we cover:

  • IT Active Needs of Research survey – coming soon!
  • RSE Midlands – 8th June
  • BEAR Challenge
  • Coding Club – May, June & July Sessions 
  • Helpers Required for Software Carpentries
  • Training workshops
  • Case Studies for Potential HPC Wire Award Nominations
  • In-Person and Virtual BEAR Drop-in Sessions

IT Active Needs of Research Survey – coming soon!

Look out in your inboxes as BEAR will be launching our delayed biennial survey later in May, focusing on ‘IT Needs for Active Research’. It is important that we hear as many views as possible on the advanced computing currently provided to support active research as well as what is missing or would be useful to have in the future. Please do encourage researchers in your area to fill in the survey, even if they are not currently users of BEAR services.

RSE Midlands – 8th June

We are happy to announce that RSE Midlands (a new community of Research Software Engineers (RSE) from around the Midlands area) will gather for the first time for the day on Wednesday 8th June in the Edgbaston Park Hotel. All RSEs and researchers who code are welcome, this will be a free event with food provided – further details are available here: https://rse-midlands.github.io/ along with a link to get tickets. Follow RSE Midlands on Twitter for updates: https://twitter.com/RSE_Midlands

BEAR Challenge

We are pleased to announce that booking is now open for the BEAR Challenge, which will be held over three days from Tuesday 21st to Thursday 23rd June. Open to undergraduate and taught postgraduate students, they will get access to our Tier 2 national supercomputer, Baskerville, with its state-of-the-art GPUs to run a series of challenges to give them experience in using High Performance Computing. The winning team will receive prizes from Lenovo! There will also be a talk on careers in HPC from a senior member of the worldwide Lenovo HPC Storage and Performance team. 

Please pass this on to any relevant taught students in your area (a working knowledge of Python is required). Further details and a booking link can be found here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bear-challenge-2022-tickets-329743149637

Coding Club – May, June & July Sessions

We held our 3rd Coding Club session on R recently 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. The next session is on 24th May on building a software pipeline and workflow tools. Find out how to sign up to the Coding Club mailing list in our blog post. 

Helpers Required for Software Carpentries

You may be aware that the BEAR team runs Software Carpentry courses on Python, Git, MATLAB and R with the assistance of a number of trained instructors from across the University. We would like to encourage more people to get involved as course helpers. You do not need to be trained in the software but have an interest and some experience in using it, enough to show someone else how to do simple tasks from instructions provided. Courses run over half-day sessions, some online and some in-person. We typically have a different helper for each session so the time commitment isn't too great. It will give you experience of training and looks good on the CV! If you are interested, please contact Debbie Carter (d.j.carter@bham.ac.uk).

Training Workshops

We have spaces available on the following training workshops, for full details and booking links visit our website: https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/bear-training

  • Introduction to BlueBEAR: 23rd May AM
  • Software Carpentry - R: 26th & 27th May AM (attend both days)
  • Software Carpentry - MATLAB: 7th & 8th June AM (attend both days)
  • NVIDIA DLI Fundamentals of Deep Learning: 29th June
  • NVIDIA DLI Accelerating Data Engineering Pipelines: 5th July 

Case Studies for Potential HPC Wire Award Nominations

We are currently thinking ahead to the next HPC Wire Awards (submission is usually around August/September) and considering all the research that has made use of BlueBEAR over the past year. The categories do change slightly but last year included ‘Best Use of Life Sciences’ (won by a UoB-led research project), ‘Best Use of HPC in Physical Sciences’ and ‘Best HPC Response to Societal Plight’ (also won by UoB researchers as part of Consortium).  

If you have any case studies to share of how you are using BlueBEAR to enable your research, then do get in touch so that we can consider putting them forward for nomination – either reply to this email or email the team at bearinfo@contacts.bham.ac.uk.

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 – Thursday 26th May 10:00-11:00  
  • *In-person* - Thursday 9th June 12:00-14:00 – Muirhead Tower Atrium
  • Via Zoom – Friday 24th June 11:00-12:00

Missed last month's newsletter?

Find April's newsletter here. Sign up to receive the newsletter direct to your inbox by joining our bear-updates mailing list here (UoB login required).

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