November 2022 Newsletter

BEAR Portal video screenshot
BEAR Portal video - see https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/bear/portal

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.

It has been great to see so many of our users and meet some new recruits during recent events, including the Welcome Event for new staff starters. We welcome those of you joining our mailing list and hope you will spread the word about BEAR services in your schools, departments and institutes! We were very pleased to restart our Digital Research Conversations series after a lengthy absence (slides available here), giving researchers the opportunity to learn from the data horror stories of others, we hope it wasn’t too scary!

This month we have some important updates for you and some exciting events happening:

  • December Maintenance
  • Case Study
  • BEAR Portal video
  • Checkpointing for long jobs
  • BEAR Champion update
  • Coding Club update
  • RSE Midlands Coding Club event
  • AI and Machine Learning Session focussed on Business & Economics
  • Training workshops
  • Online Coding Conference
  • In-Person and Virtual BEAR Drop-in Sessions

December Maintenance

Between Monday 12th (5pm) and Wednesday 14th December, during the University IT Major Maintenance Window, Advanced Research Computing will be undertaking upgrade works on BEAR services. During this time, access to all BEAR services will be unavailable but we will aim to return live services as soon as we can on the 14th. Reminders will be sent nearer the time and there will be updates on the IT Services Status page: https://status.bham.ac.uk/

Case Study

In our latest case study, researcher Gabriela da Silva Xavier explains how, driven by the COVID-19 lockdown, she has been making use of BEAR’s storage and data processing power for imaging and RNA-sequencing data, in both her research and teaching.

BEAR Portal Video

We now have a demo video (16 mins) describing how to use the BEAR Portal, which provides web-based access to a range of BEAR services, such as JupyterLab, RStudio, and GUI applications. It also provides access for submitting BlueBEAR compute jobs.

Checkpointing for long jobs 

Ever been in the situation where your machine learning or Bayesian model has stopped working after hours of computation, but you've got nothing to show for it? Then you need Checkpointing - this automatically saves a model when a condition, such as "every 5 iterations" has been reached. That way should you ever be (and you will be) in the unfortunate position of having to recover from a crash, you can just reload the model and continue, or evaluate where you got to. The library for this in R includes "brms" and here's an article on doing it in PyTorch. Please contact us if you would like help adding checkpointing to your BlueBEAR jobs.

BEAR Champion Update

Find out more about our BEAR Champions, how the group has expanded in the last year and meeting in person (finally!) in our new blog post here: https://blog.bham.ac.uk/bear/2022/11/11/bear-champion-team-expansion/

Coding Club Update

Attendance at our Coding Club declined over time and without an Academic lead, we were struggling to find relevant topics and speakers. We have found that there are two different audiences for a Coding Club; 1) those interested in coding but don’t know where to start and 2) advanced coders who want to improve. For 1) we are continuing with a small group to take them from Excel through to writing a basic program – get in touch with Aslam if interested (a.k.ghumra@bham.ac.uk). For 2) we recommend attending the RSE Midlands Coding Club (see below) that we will be coordinating. You can find session recordings and slides from our Coding Club in the Canvas course.

RSE Midlands Coding Club

The first RSE Midlands Coding Club event will be held on 23rd November, 14:00-15:00. One of our RSEs, Gavin Yearwood, will be kicking things off and there will be some information about the 2023 RSE Midlands Conference. In-person attendance is in room UG06 Murray Learning Centre, but you can also attend online via Zoom. Keep updated via the rse-midlands website or on Twitter @RSE_Midlands.

AI and Machine Learning Session Focussed on Business & Economics

On Thursday 24th November at 4pm, Advanced Research Computing (or the BEAR team!) and researchers in the Business School and Economics will be presenting a hybrid 1 hour session around the use of machine learning and AI techniques in relation to their research areas. Find out how to attend on the event webpage here.

Training Workshops

We still have spaces available on upcoming training courses, including Git, Linux, and MATLAB. For more information and to sign up, see our training website.

Online Coding Conference

Normconf is a free online conference taking place from lunchtime on 15th December covering data and machine learning topics from Python to Docker. Talks are recorded, which may be useful as it is in US time!

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: 

  • In person – Wednesday 23rd November, 12:30–13:30, 52 Pritchatts Road foyer
  • Via Zoom – Friday 2nd December, 11:00-12:00 

Missed last month's newsletter?

Find October'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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