Welcome to the April edition of the Imperial College Research Software Community newsletter.
Hope you all had an enjoyable break over the Easter closure. Despite the break, there’s been lots of activity in the Imperial RSE community this month with several members attending the Software Sustainability Institute’s Collaborations Workshop (CW19) in Loughborough at the start of the month, the first of the popular series of Software Carpentry workshops run by Katerina Michalickova to be held at St Mary’s Campus taking place in mid-April and a community seminar at St Mary’s. There was also strong representation from our community at the RSLondon lunchtime seminar hosted by University of Westminster in early April.
There’s lots going on in the wider RSE community too and we can’t capture everything. If you know of an event, activity, project or tool that may be of interest to the Imperial community, we’re always on the look out for newsletter items so please let us know. You can e-mail details of news articles or event information to rse-committee@imperial.ac.uk. Likewise, we’re always happy to receive feedback and suggestions. Further details of how to get in touch and how to get involved with the community are at the end of the newsletter.
In this month’s newsletter:
Imperial Physics RSE seminar: On Friday 17th May, 11:00-13:00, there will be a Physics-focused RSE community seminar taking place in SAF room 120. This is a great opportunity to hear speakers from the Physics department talking about their software and tools and the development challenges that they face. There will be two main talks followed by a set of lightning talks. Further information, registration, and the option to sign-up to give a lightning talk are available via http://bit.ly/ResearchSoftwarePhysics (Note that an Imperial login is required to access this form). If you have any questions, please contact Diego Alonso-Álvarez
RSE Conference 2019 Call for Participation: A Call for Submissions is open until the 7th of May for the RSE Conference 2019 RSECon19 are looking for talks, walkthroughs, panels, posters, lightning talks and workshops. Proposals in a wide range of subjects are encouraged, and from researchers at any career stage and software developers working in a research context, whatever their job title or field. First-time speakers are encouraged and there is mentoring available.
IDEAS-Productivity webinar, 8th May: The next IDEAS-Productivity webinar in the Best Practices for HPC Software Developers series will take place on Wednesday 8th May, 18:00-19:00 UK (13:00-14:00 ET) - So, You Want to Be Agile? Strategies for Introducing Agility Into Your Scientific Software Project, Mike Heroux (SNL). See https://ideas-productivity.org/events/hpc-best-practices-webinars/ for details and registration.
Software Citation Workshop, 13th/14th May: A workshop on Software Citation is being co-organised by the British Library, Software Sustainability Institute and The Alan Turing Institute. The workshop will take place at the British Library on Monday 13th and Tuesday 14th May. Further information and registration is available here.
KQ Codes Technical Socials: The Knowledge Quarter Codes are informal events for anyone with an interest in the computational methods and technology behind research and innovation. They are an opportunity to get to know fellow practitioners, and to discuss and learn about useful tools and techniques which may help with your work. All are welcome, whatever your background or career stage. The next KQ Codes Tech Social will take place at 5pm on Wednesday 15th May. Details are on UCL’s KQ Codes events page.
Peter Lindsay Memorial Lecture 2019: Professor Christopher Bishop will deliver the Peter Lindsay Memorial Lecture 2019 - The AI Revolution: Hype vs Reality - on Thursday 30th May, 17:30 in SAF G16. See the eventbrite page for further details and registration (required).
SC-Camp 2019: The 10th International SuperComputing Camp 2019 (SC-Camp 2019) will take place 10th-14th June 2019 in Madrid, Spain. For further details and registration, see http://www.sc-camp.org/2019/.
Tenth international Women in HPC workshop: Women in HPC will be participating in the ISC High Performance Conference 16th-20th June in Frankfurt, Germany. The Workshop “Diversifying the HPC community and engaging male allies” will run on the 20th June 2019 - more details here.
ARCHER Summer School: Registration is open for the ARCHER Summer School 2019. This includes a Hands-on Introduction to HPC (15-16 July) and Message-passing Programming with MPI (17-19 July). Registration here.
The Software Sustainability Institute has announced its 2019 cohort of Fellows and we’d like to congratulate Lucy Whalley of the Department of Materials and a member of our local Imperial community committee on being awarded one of these fellowships.
Simon Hettrick, University of Southampton and Deputy Director of the SSI has been interviewed about research software engineers for Nature’s Working Scientist Podcast.
Building on last month’s mention of Iodide another, related, currently experimental, Mozilla project Pyodide provides a full Python scientific stack that can run directly in the browser See this twitter post for a link to an article on how Pyodide works.
Our Research Software of the Month for April 2019 is Nektar++ an open-source high-order spectral/hp element method framework. Development of Nektar++ is led jointly by Prof. Spencer Sherwin and Dr Chris Cantwell in the Department of Aeronautics at Imperial, Prof. Mike Kirby in the School of Computing, University of Utah and Dr David Moxey in the College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, University of Exeter.
Nektar++ provides a group of libraries that support the development of scalable, high-performance partial differential equation solvers. A group of ready-to-run solvers that support simulation of a wide range of different problems is also provided with the framework. For example, solvers are provided for modelling compressible and incompressible flows and wave interactions. Use cases for Nektar++ cover a wide range of domains including automotive, aeronautical and civil engineering and biomedical simulations (e.g. blood flow and propagation of electrical waves within the heart). The gallery on the Nektar++ website provides a number of examples of the types of problems that the software has been used to simulate.
Each month we highlight a piece of research software that is being used or developed at Imperial. If you have a suggestion of some software that you’d like to see us feature, please email rse-committee@imperial.ac.uk.
There are a number of training courses at Imperial over the coming months. The next Software Carpentry workshop on 1st/2nd May at South Kensington is now fully booked but more Software Carpentry workshops will be advertised soon.
See the full list of training courses at Imperial here. If you have any questions about Software Carpentry or any of the other listed training courses please email Katerina Michalickova.
UCL Open Science Salon are running a 1-hour “Introduction to GitHub for Researchers” on Tuesday 7th May, 13:00-14:00. A link to further information and registration are available via this tweet.
If you’re interested in training covering other software development-related topics that are not listed, contact Jeremy Cohen to discuss.
The Modern Lab Notebook is a substantial video tutorial by Quentin Stafford-Fraser covering numerical analysis and data science techniques in Python.
Ian Cosden, Princeton University has written a short post “Why Research Software Engineers?” for the US Research Software Sustainability Institute’s (URSSI) blog.
If you make use of Jupyter Notebooks, check out treon, an open source test framework for Jupyter Notebooks.
Streamlining Software Development through Continuous Integration: A blog post looking at the use of continuous integration in the context of the PFLOTRAN project.
The Materials and Megabytes podcast explores the development of machine learning for materials science, physics, and chemistry applications through conversation with researchers at the forefront of this growing interdisciplinary field.
That’s all for this month, and thanks to everyone who suggested links for this edition. If you’d like anything included in the newsletter, have ideas about how it could be improved, or would even like to guest-edit a future edition then just drop us a line at rse-committee@imperial.ac.uk.
This edition of the Research Software Community Newsletter was edited by Jeremy Cohen