September 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.
Over the summer, Bear continued their #BearonTour series with a visit to the School of Chemistry. You can find out about how Dr Anna Peacock uses BlueBEAR to design new protein structures in our blog post. As we head into the new academic year, we will be busy attending induction sessions for new postgraduate researchers, as well as providing lots of training opportunities with a new schedule of our popular training workshops (coming soon).
Read below to find out more BEAR news, including both voluntary and paid opportunities to gain transferable skills:
- 5,000 extra cores for BlueBEAR
- BEAR service problems
- New starters in Advanced Research Computing
- Part-time role available in the Research Engagement and Data Group
- Special Interest Groups – call for volunteers
- CIUK 2023 opportunities for participation
- UK Data Service training workshops
- Case study on using BlueBEAR to explore second language acquisition
- In-person and virtual BEAR drop-in sessions
5,000 extra cores for BlueBEAR
We are pleased to announce the addition of new Icelake nodes, courtesy of our Architecture, Infrastructure and Systems (AIS) group, providing access to an additional 5,000 cores to the queue 'bbdefault' of our supercomputer, BlueBEAR. This means that there are now ~20,000 total available cores for use in BlueBEAR. We will also inform our users shortly, via the BlueBEAR service mailing list, about the significantly increased number of CPU cores, as well as GPUs, that can be requested per user.
BEAR service problems
The BEAR service was severely and variously impacted by a network routing problem in mid-August for which we would like to apologise. We understand that such problems are disruptive to your work. Please be assured that we work hard to avoid such events and react quickly when we spot them. Troubleshooting the issues proved to be a complex and time-consuming process exacerbated by the timing during the holiday period. The trigger for events was a mistake made during a change the team was implementing to add and upgrade equipment. Several steps have been identified to reduce the risk of similar mistakes, as well as limit impact in the future.
In response to the glitch that hit the service on Wednesday this week, we are in contact with our supplier. It occurred when we were applying an 'in-flight' firmware upgrade and should not have affected the service.
You may be interested to note that we are actively recruiting to fill our vacant infrastructure engineer posts and reinforce the small and highly skilled AIS team.
New starters in Advanced Research Computing
Over the last few months, we have welcomed 5 new people to the Advanced Research Computing (ARC) team. Dr James Tyrrell has joined the Research Software Group as a Senior Research Software Engineer and Manager, along with three Senior Research Data Scientists, joint with the Interdisciplinary Institute of Data Science and AI – Dr Cai Wingfield, Dr Kamilla Kopec-Harding and Dr Jeremy Pike. Salih Ahmedjoined the AIS team as a Graduate Systems Engineer and Kirsty McCready joined the Research Engagement and Data Group until December as an Intern.
Part-time role available in the Research Engagement and Data Group
We have an opportunity to gain valuable transferable skills in organising training and events, marketing and writing technical content. This Grade 6 0.4FTE (15 hours per week, 2 year fixed post) Training Coordinator role will enable the ARC team to deliver an expanded range of BEAR training workshops to researchers. We are looking for applicants with clear communication skills, as well as experience in data analysis to analyse feedback to develop the new workshops. See our blog post for more details on the position and how to apply.
Special Interest Groups - call for volunteers
R User Group
We are currently looking for volunteers to help set up an R User Group at the University of Birmingham. This Special Interest Group (SIG) will bring together R Users from across the University to share knowledge and skills. If you are interested in getting involved, please contact Kamilla by 5pm on Wednesday 11th October – see our R User Group blog post for further details.
PGR Coding Club
The PGR Coding Club at the University of Birmingham is a cross-College collaboration of PostGraduate Researchers (PGRs) aiming to help people to improve their programming skills, through seminars and workshop activities. We are looking for organisers to help run this club – if you are interested, please email Joshua Barrass (jcb877@student.bham.ac.uk). You can find out more about the PGR Coding Club here.
CIUK 2023 opportunities for participation
Computing Insight UK (CIUK) is due to run in Manchester over 7th-8th December. The theme for this year’s Conference is ‘Productive Supercomputing’ and there will be an exhibition showcasing the latest hardware and software releases, plus two days of presentations and breakout sessions. Applications are currently being accepted for a student poster competition (deadline Sunday 29th October), with selected poster presenters receiving free access to the Conference.
Applications are also being accepted from supervisors of Early Career Researchers for the Jacky Pallas Memorial Award – an opportunity for them to get a talk slot in the main programme at CIUK (deadline Friday 27th October).
UK Data Service training workshops
The UK Data Service offers free online workshops to assist researchers working with qualitative data. Upcoming workshops this Autumn include ‘How to anonymise qualitative and quantitative data’ and ‘How to become a computational social scientist’. More information and booking details can be found on the UK Data Service training webpages.
Case study on using BlueBEAR to explore second language acquisition
In this month’s featured case study, Dr Akira Murakami (Birmingham Fellow from English Language and Linguistics) explains how he has used our supercomputer, BlueBEAR, to enable his research into understanding how people acquire languages other than their native language. Akira used BlueBEAR for computationally demanding Bayesian statistical modelling, as well as text data processing, substantially reducing the computational time required to obtain results.
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 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:
- At the Employee Benefits Fayre, Great Hall, Aston Webb – Thursday 5th October, 12:00 – 14:00
- Via Zoom – Tuesday 10th October, 13:30 – 14:30
- Via Zoom – Friday 27th October, 11:00 – 12:00
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