Imperial College Research Software Community Newsletter - April 2019

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:

Upcoming events

Research software news

Research Software of the Month

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.

RSE Bytes

Funding

Training

Tutorials

The Modern Lab Notebook is a substantial video tutorial by Quentin Stafford-Fraser covering numerical analysis and data science techniques in Python.

Blogposts / Podcasts / Misc

Get in touch, get involved!

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