May 2023 newsletter
Professor Ole Jenson speaking at the BEAR PGR Conference, 2023
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 BIFoR. Bear had a fantastic time meeting staff and students at the University's very own forest research site! You can find out more about the research of Dr Adriane Esquivel Muelbert in our blog post. Read below to find out more BEAR news, including our rescheduled Digital Research Conversation on ‘Software Licensing’.
In this newsletter we cover:
- Digital Research Conversations – Software Licensing
- BEAR PGR Conference 2023
- Essential HPC tools – tmux
- Upcoming training workshops
- How to log a ticket with BEAR
- Data visualisation sessions for PGRs
- CFD Special Interest Group session – Multiflow3D
- Case study on using BlueBEAR to solve one of the hardest problems in Physics
- In-person and virtual BEAR drop-in sessions
Digital Research Conversations - Software Licensing
Join us for lunch on Wednesday 7th June (12-2pm) to hear from expert speakers on Intellectual Property and copyright, as well as Research Software Engineers who have created and shared their own code. This session was sparked by questions around how to balance the Intellectual Property rights of the person who wrote the code with open source licensing permissions. Book your place via the software licensing session Eventbrite page.
BEAR PGR Conference 2023
Back in April, a team of PostGraduate Research (PGR) students delivered the 2023 BEAR PGR Conference, to allow others to hear about the fascinating research making use of High Performance Computing here at the university. You can read a summary of the two days in our BEAR PGR Conference 2023 blog post.
Essential HPC tools - tmux
Have you ever lost your connection to BlueBEAR and wished you didn’t have to start all over again? Dr James Allsopp, one of our Research Software Engineers, takes you through how to use tmux to rejoin a previous session in his blog post on essential HPC tools.
Upcoming training workshops
We still have spaces available on upcoming training courses starting this week, including Git, Linux, MATLAB, R and Python. For more information and to sign up, see our training webpages.
How to log a ticket with BEAR
You may not be aware that there are direct routes to create a Service Desk ticket with the BEAR team, without it needing to be triaged through the central IT Service Desk (these links require you to login to the Service Desk):
Data visualisation sessions for PGRs
If you are a PGR wanting to design accessible and eye-catching data visualisations, then come along to the ‘Data Made Beautiful’ interactive workshops, hosted by the ‘We don’t byte’ PGR Coding Club’. The workshops will be held over two sessions: Monday 12th June 2-4pm and Monday 19th June, 2-4pm in GD20, Metallurgy and Materials. The first session will be led by Dr Ilija Rasovic, followed by a student-led feedback session in the subsequent week. All PGRs are welcome and no coding experience is required, please contact Seb Gilbert with any queries (sgg897@student.bham.ac.uk).
CFD Special Interest Group session - Multiflow3D
Just a reminder about the session on Friday 9th June between 10am-12pm for the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Special Interest Group (SIG). Chair of the SIG, Dr Bruño Fraga from the School of Engineering will be presenting Multiflow3D: an introduction to an in-house CFD solver in the School of Engineering, room 127. See further details on the blog post on the CFD SIG.
Case study on using BlueBEAR to solve one of the hardest problems in Physics
In this month’s featured case study, Benjamin Jenkins (EngD student from Chemical Engineering) explains how he has used our supercomputer BlueBEAR to help him solve one of the hardest problems in Physics, the study of powders. Ben uses Discrete Element Method (DEM) to run thousands of simulations on BlueBEAR, with the ultimate aim of designing better powder handling and processing equipment for manufacturing.
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 dates for June will be added to the webpage soon:
- Via Zoom – Thursday 1st June, 12:00 – 13:00
- Via Zoom – Tuesday 13th June, 13:30 – 14:30
Missed last month's newsletter?
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