September BEAR Newsletter
Baskerville Tier 2 HPC-Facility in our Research Data Centre
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.
As the semester starts, we are gearing up for the new intake of Post Graduate Research students and the Research Engagement Group will be presenting at various induction sessions and seminars to spread the word about all the BEAR services available. In this month’s newsletter you can read more about our recent, highly successful BEAR PGR Conference, run by a Committee of PGR students and our first in-person event for 18 months, where we officially launched Baskerville, our Tier 2 HPC-facility.
In this newsletter we cover:
- How to recover deleted data from the BEAR Research Data Store (RDS)
- BEAR PGR Conference 2021
- Baskerville Launch
- Department/Group meetings
- Training events from the UK Data Service & Matlab
- Drop-in sessions
How to recover deleted data from the BEAR Research Data Store (RDS)
Have you inadvertently deleted data or ever wanted to retrieve a previous version of your file? The Research Data Store has a facility where we take a snapshot of the data and hold it for 4 days, so that you can recover the data yourself via a Windows or Linux device. To see instructions on how to retrieve snapshots please visit our web pages:
BEAR PGR Conference 2021
On the 8th September we held the 11th BEAR PGR conference. From sequencing covid, using Daphnia for looking at global change to using data science to study language. An amazing array of talks which reflect the diverse work carried out on BEAR, but the real stars are the research staff and students. We will be putting up the talks/posters at the following website: https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/bear/bear-pgr-2021
Baskerville Launch
Baskerville, our new Tier-2 HPC facility was officially launched last week, this facility is a collaboration between UoB, Diamond Light, The Rosalind Franklin Institute, The Alan Turing Institute and UKRI/EPSRC and will serve to accelerate progress in areas such as materials design, drug development and machine learning research. More information can be found on the Baskerville webpages: https://www.baskerville.ac.uk/ The launch was well attended and a summary of the day, including how researchers are using Baskerville already in their research can be read here: https://blog.bham.ac.uk/bear/2021/09/22/the-launch-of-baskerville-a-tier-2-hpc-system/
Department/Group Meetings
If you need to know more about our services and your team/dept would like more information about us and how you can benefit from BEAR, we are able to come and visit or talk to your whole team via Zoom (or in person). Let us know by emailing bearinfo@contacts.bham.ac.uk and we can discuss times and dates.
UK Data Service Training (FREE)
The UK Data Service have just released their introductory training series for Autumn 2021. Their courses (online) range from basic data management to 'Introduction to secondary analysis for qualitative and quantitative data', 'Consent issues in data sharing' to 'Getting started with secondary analysis'. See the events pages https://ukdataservice.ac.uk/training-events for a full list of training events.
Matlab Training (FREE)
The webinars will be given by Loren Sure who has worked for MathWorks for 30 years, both as a developer and as application engineer, these 4 MATLAB webinars will be running at 15:00 on 27th, 28th, 29th, 30th September for an hour each day. These will cover subjects like ‘What’s new in MATLAB’ and the ’21 MATLAB features you need to know’, to register please use the following link: https://www.mathworks.com/company/events/seminars/se-loren-shure-tour-2021.html
Virtual BEAR Drop-in Sessions
We are running our virtual drop-in sessions via Zoom as it allows us to create breakout rooms to discuss particular questions face-to-face. You can use these sessions to find out more about BEAR in general and the advanced research computing facilities we provide or we can answer specific questions e.g. running jobs on BlueBEAR, using the BlueBEAR portal or how to migrate from BEAR DataShare.
Current dates are listed here and below:
- Friday 8th October 10am – 11am
- Thursday 14th October 1.30pm – 2.30pm
- Tuesday 19th October 11am – 12pm
To join the drop-in sessions, email bearinfo@contacts.bham.ac.uk and we will send you the Zoom link and instructions on joining. Please let us know the topic of your query, so we can find the most suitable BEAR team member to speak to you.
Missed last month's newsletter?
Find August's newsletter here.