One of the foundations of the Birmingham Environment for Academic Research (BEAR) is a long-standing partnership with Lenovo as the supplier of our compute and storage infrastructure. Together with Lenovo, Advanced Research Computing (ARC) has designed and built a highly efficient and powerful environment to support computationally or data intensive research; probably one of the top 10 university facilities in the UK.
Today, BEAR supports nearly 6000 active researchers, including collaborators. Built largely on Lenovo’s Neptune family of servers and housed in a water-cooled data centre, we aim to minimise both running costs and the environmental impact of the operation while providing world-class services to researchers.
But the partnership is not purely about the (development and) supply of great equipment, Lenovo are enthusiastic sponsors and supporters of events at Birmingham such as the Baskerville Showcase in April 24 and the annual BEAR Challenge, as well as flag wavers for Birmingham’s nominations at the industry-leading HPCWire Awards. These are a fantastic opportunity to showcase some of the amazing computational science carried out by our researchers at the annual Supercomputing conference in the USA. Birmingham’s research has won consistently over the past few years, including in Denver in 2023– see 2023 Winners.
More recently, Lenovo are set to be a sponsor of an innovative, community outreach project ‘Recycled Arguments’ looking to ensure the voices of the region’s young people from underprivileged backgrounds are heard on the vital subject of the plastics waste crisis. Led by Birmingham’s Dr Kit Windows-Yule, the project is being enabled and supported by the Birmingham Plastics Network and local theatre group, Stan’s Café. Other funders/sponsors include the Royal Society of Chemistry, illustrating the importance of this work and the aim of taking the emerging messages to policy makers.