Hello Imperial RSEs! Hope you’ve all been having a great summer.
While it may be holiday time for many of you, there’s still lots happening in the world of Research Software and we have another bumper issue of our monthly newsletter for you with details of various upcoming events and activities, announcements and software to take a look at.
As we head towards the start of the academic year, we’ll be making a renewed effort to grow our community membership and get the message out about the community to people who are new to Imperial and those who are not familiar with the research software activities and opportunities around the College. If you have have new colleagues over the next couple of months who are working with software, let them know about the community and our mailing list. Also feel free to forward on this newsletter to anyone who you think it may be of interest to.
In this month’s newsletter:
2nd-6th September: 12th European Conference on Python in Science (EuroSciPy) in Bilbao, Spain. Online ticket sales have now ended but on desk tickets are available at the event.
11th September: The next IDEAS-Productivity Best Practices for HPC Software Developers webinar will take place 18:00-19:00 UK (13:00-14:00 ET) on Discovering and Addressing Social Challenges in the Evolution of Scientific Software Projects. The webinar is free but registration is required.
13th-17th September, Cardiff, UK: PyCon UK 2019 will take place in Cardiff over 5-days in mid-September. Tickets are still available.
17th-19th September: RSEConUK 2019 will be held at the University of Birmingham. Registration for the conference has now closed but if you’ve registered, you can personalise your conference programme by specifying the sessions you would like to attend via Sched.
Imperial attendees are involved in various sessions at the conference:
24th September, afternoon: The Fortran annual joint meeting with Computational Physics Group of Institute of Physics will take place at the BCS in London. Note that the morning AGM is open to Fortran SG members but the afternoon presentations are open to all (see the agenda for details)
25th-27th September: This year’s Imperial Research Computing summer school takes place 25th-27th September. The theme of the event this year is Machine Learning and the first two days will be a “Fundamentals of machine learning” tutorial delivered by Google. The third day of the event will include the opportunity for researchers to give short talks on their Machine Learning-related research. If you’d be interested to give a talk, please contact Katerina Michalickova for further information. Registration for this event is now open via the summer school information page.
30th September-1st October, Cambridge, UK: Two-day workshop on “Programming the ARM64 Processor”. Registration is currently open.
Imperial’s Research Computing Service are recruiting a Senior RSE to work on projects across College. This is a generalist role involving scientific software development, data science, training and community engagement. The application deadline is 22nd September. Apply here or contact Mark Woodbridge with any informal questions.
Imperial will be hosting a Software Carpentry Instructor training workshop on Thursday 31st October and Friday 1st November. Please contact Katerina Michalickova for more information.
The RESIDE group, based at St Mary’s Campus, have a blog post on Deferring Errors with R that was posted earlier this month.
The Devito project have released version 3.5 of the Devito software. This release includes a number of enhancements, in particular MPI support. There are also some new tutorials in this latest release.
The Society of Research Software Engineering has launched its new website.
Our Research Software of the Month for August 2019 is PyFR.
PyFR is a computational fluid dynamics solver. It is being developed jointly by teams at Imperial College London and Texas A&M University. Features of PyFR include the ability to run at arbitrary orders of accuracy in space on mixed element unstructured grids, and the ability to run on a range of hardware platforms, including clusters on GPUs and heterogeneous systems with a mixture of CPUs and GPUs. PyFR has been deployed to solve a range of fundamental and industrial flow problems. The latter work was shortlisted for the Gordon Bell Prize in 2016.
PyFR is released under an Open Source 3-Clause BSD License and the code is available on GitHub.
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.
Imperial’s Research Computing Skills team runs a variety of courses targeted at graduate students. Registration for courses for the 2019-2020 academic year will open at the end of September. The Research Computing Service and Computational Methods Hub also provide training courses (RCS / CM Hub).
If you have technical questions relating to research software development or use of the Research Computing Service’s HPC resources, you can come along to one of the regular RCS Clinics that take place weekly.
If you have any questions about Software Carpentry or any of the other listed training courses please email Katerina Michalickova.
If you’re interested in training covering other software development-related topics that are not listed, please contact Jeremy Cohen to discuss.
There are many free programming books (and courses) that are available courtesy of the Free Ebook Foundation.
An article has been published in Nature Toolbox, Julia: come for the syntax, stay for the speed, that provides an interesting insight into the potential performance benefits of using Julia over languages such as Python and R. Julia is available on the Research Computing Service’s Jupyter deployment.
URSSI, the US Research Software Sustainability Institute, has published a blog post by Wolfgang Bangerth - Leading a Scientific Software Project: It’s All Personal
University of Warwick RSE have a technical blog that may be of interest. In particular, their recent post on memory management in Fortran is worth checking out if you work with or are interested in Fortran.
University of Sheffield’s RSE Team also have a blog. For anyone keen to learn Python, take a look at their most recent post How Do You Learn Python?.
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 drop us a line at rse-committee@imperial.ac.uk. And if you’re reading this on the web and would like to receive the next newsletter directly to your inbox then please subscribe to our RSE Community Mailing List here.
This edition of the Research Software Community Newsletter was edited by Jeremy Cohen