BEAR User Group

The BEAR User Group aims to bring users of BEAR services together to enable their research through:

  • Providing opportunities for users to meet to share the user experience 
  • Identifying problems and raising any concerns with Advanced Research Computing (ARC)
  • Supporting University initiatives in relevant areas

The BEAR User Group is chaired by a member of the Research Computing Management Committee, currently Dietmar Heinke (July 2024). The Chair coordinates a group of postgraduate researchers to deliver the annual BEAR Conference to showcase the research that BEAR enables, and bring users and ARC together. 

BEAR Champions

The BEAR Champion group is a voluntary team of postgraduate researchers and staff from across the University that meets monthly, providing feedback to ARC on services and training needs, as well as spreading the word in their area. Find out more on our BEAR Champion webpages, including who your local BEAR Champion is. 

Interested in becoming a BEAR Champion?

Have you found BEAR services have helped you in your research? Do you want to help others get access to the secure storage and fast data processing available? Have the BEAR Software group helped you to write code? Do you know people who are not aware of us?

We are continually looking for staff and research students at the University of Birmingham who would like to volunteer to become BEAR Champions in their area to provide local expertise about BEAR services. BEAR Champions also provide an important feedback route to the BEAR team, representing the interests of users from various areas and helping us to prioritise developments to the service by identifying areas of common concern. Please see our blog post for more details. 

 

Special Interest Groups

The User Group has Special Interest Groups (SIGs) to act as a focus of discussion and self-help for users of specific applications, languages and/or disciplines.

The current groups include:

Interested in setting up your own Special Interest Group?

If you are using any aspect of BEAR services, then there are likely to be many others like you. Setting up a Special Interest Group (SIG) is a good way of getting and receiving peer group support, often from people outside of your research area. Any BEAR-related service is a candidate for a SIG, and could include:

  • Application specific groups, such as Abaqus (finite-element structural analysis) or Ansys CFX and Fluent (computational fluid dynamics)
  • Domain specific groups such as *Omics with specialist resources such as Galaxy and GATK
  • Programming languages, including parallel code development

Offers to help in or lead any of these subgroups would be welcomed by the BEAR User Group Chair, Dr. Dietmar Heinke (School of Psychology) (d.g.heinke@bham.ac.uk).