Advanced Research Computing Team

Advanced Research Computing manages services to meet the specialist computing needs of researchers and their collaborators

Part of IT Services and reporting to the Chief Information Officer, the Advanced Research Computing (ARC) team provides powerful computing systems and tightly-coupled, fast data storage to meet the challenges of research in a whole range of academic disciplines. With over 1,000 applications and libraries built for both HPC and Cloud platforms, the team supports traditional analysis, simulation, modelling, visualisation, AI as well as the latest innovative techniques.

Together, ARC delivers BEAR, the Birmingham Environment for Academic Research. Importantly, BEAR includes guidance and a range of support options for researchers alongside the leading technology solutions. We also run Baskerville, a national accelerated compute system, hosted at the University and providing researchers with access to over 200 high powered GPUs.

Who are we?

The team is led by Dr Andrew Edmondson and operates in five inter-dependent groups: 

  • The Architecture Infrastructure and Systems Group, led by Dr Jon Wakelin, develops and manages the cutting-edge infrastructure that underpins BEAR and Baskerville. 

  • The Researcher Engagement and Data Group led by Dr Stephanie Thompson, networks with researchers across the University at all stages of their careers to raise awareness of what BEAR can offer, as well as supporting both new and established users via training and 1:1 support sessions.

  • The BEAR Applications Team, led by Dr Simon Branford and Dr James Carpenter, installs and curates a comprehensive suite of applications for researchers to use on the HPC systems ARC provides and supports researchers to make best use of them.
  • The Research Software Engineering Service (RSE Service), led by Dr Adrian Garcia, provides both paid-for free basis engagements, including advice, coaching, coding and mentoring for researchers.
  • The Research Data Science Service (RDSci Service), led by Dr Kamilla Kopec-Harding, is a collaboration by ARC and the Institute for Data and AI (IDAI). The RDSci Service's mission is to enable and advance state-of-the-art data science research at the University of Birmingham through a range of complementary services.

Together the BEAR Applications Team, RSE Service and RDSci Service form a closely-collaborating, virtual Research Software Group.

Please contact us with any queries.