University of Birmingham joins COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium

The UK government has backed their leading clinicians and scientists this week with new resources to map how COVID-19 spreads and evolves using whole-genome sequencing. Through a £20 million investment, the consortium will look for breakthroughs that help the UK respond to this and future pandemics, and save lives. “The government’s investment is well-timed to accelerate the pace of viral genome sequence production and ensure this information is openly available to epidemiologists and virologists worldwide. This will provide an unprecedented real-time view of COVID-19 virus evolution.”

HPC Bear Cloud to Power Research at University of Birmingham

Designed specifically with researchers in mind, the Birmingham Environment for Academic Research (BEAR) Cloud will augment an already rich set of IT services at the University of Birmingham and will be used by academics across all disciplines, from Medicine to Archaeology, and Physics to Theology. “We are very proud of the new system, but building a research cloud isn’t easy,” said Simon Thompson, Research Computing Infrastructure Architect in IT Services at the University of Birmingham. “We challenged a range of carefully-selected partners to provide the underlying technology.”