Imperial College Research Software Community Newsletter - June 2020

Hello and welcome to this month’s Research Software Community Newsletter. There’s a sense of positivity in the air with lockdown restrictions slowly being relaxed, conferences going online, and England proving it can produce at least a few summer days. There were some exciting announcements and interesting insights this month, so we’ve got lots of links to share! We also have reminders of some useful tools, resources and ongoing community activities. As usual, please get in touch with any ideas and links you’d like to see featured in the next newsletter, contact details at the bottom of the newsletter.

• Dates for your diary
• RSE Bytes
  • News
  • Blog posts, tools & more
• Research Software of the Month
• Some reminders…
• Get in Touch, Get Involved!

Dates for your diary

• JuliaCon 2020 is online and is free to attend! Register by 31st July if you’re interested in attending.
• EPSRC have released a pre-announcement for their next Research Software Engineer (RSE) Fellowships call. The call will open on 30th June and the deadline for submission of outline proposals is 18th August (see RSE Bytes for further information).
• The call for submissions for the 9th Workshop on Python for High-Performance and Scientific Computing closes 4th September.
• Applications for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Essential Open Source Software for Science, Cycle 3 grants are now open and close 4th August.
• The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is hosting a Deep Learning for Science School webinar series that starts 9th July.
• SORSE, a new International Series of Online Research Software Events, has just launched and opened its 1st call with a submission deadline of 12th July 2020. SORSE are accepting submission of abstracts for talks as well as a variety of other event types from panels to software demos and mini workshops.

RSE Bytes

News

• The influential covid-sim model - developed by Imperial’s MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis - which was also the subject of some controversy on its release as an open source project on GitHub in recent months, has been confirmed as reproducible in an analysis by CODECHECK.
• Listen to Richard Fitzjohn being interviewed by Peter Schmidt in the RSE Stories podcast series. Richard, who leads the RESIDE (Research Software for Infectious Disease Epidemiology) group in Imperial’s Department for Infectious Disease Epidemiology, talks about his work leading a team of RSEs developing epidemiological models, and more.
• The Research Computing Service’s Research Computing Tips continue to be published weekly. The most recent entries covered Transferring data to and from the Research Data Store and Running Jupyter notebooks on the RCS compute service. Please contact Mark Woodbridge (m.woodbridge@imperial.ac.uk) with suggestions for future tips.
• Imperial’s Research Software Directory now includes over 120 entries. Take a look, and open an issue and/or a pull request if you want to contribute.
• Research Software Hour, hosted by members of the Nordic-RSE community, continues weekly on Twitch.

EPSRC Research Software Engineering Fellowships Call: As highlighted above, EPSRC have released a pre-announcement for their next Research Software Engineering Fellowships call which is due to open on 30th June 2020. If you’re interested in applying, there are a few resources for further information:

• A channel (#rse_fellowships_2020) has been set up on the UK RSE Slack workspace (see the SocRSE Contact page for signup details) on which a number of existing RSE Fellows and community members are available to answer questions and offer general advice.
• A webinar will take place on the 7th July, 10am: Registration and further details
• If you’re thinking about applying but are unsure or you have questions, Jeremy Cohen is happy to offer informal advice on his experience of the benefits and opportunities that the scheme can offer.

Blog posts, tools & more

• What is Research Software? VanessaSaurus has written a blog post proposing a framework for defining research software and is asking for contributions to developing this definition.
• Also from Vanessa: a couple of articles on Developer Productivity, the first of which includes “The 10 Best Practices for Remote Software Engineering”.
• The latest edition of the new Fortran newsletter mentions they have begun monthly calls.
• A step-by-step guide to setting up a Hypermodern Python project structure. This complements and extends the “Tools” sections of the Imperial RSE course material.
• If you’re looking for an IDE specifically designed for computational materials science, take a look at pyiron.
• An introduction to the Julia language and using its REPL as a command-line calculator.

Research Software of the Month

This month’s Research software of the month is Brian. Brian is a Python package for simulating the activity of networks of brain cells (neurons). It’s designed to “save the time of scientists as well as processors”: users write a high level description of the model including differential equations in standard mathematical notation, and Brian automatically generates, compiles and runs C++ code for the simulation. It is widely used in neuroscience for research and teaching.

The Brian 2 core team is split between Imperial College London and the Institut de la Vision, Paris. If you’d like further information on Brian, contact Dan Goodman in Imperial’s Intelligent Systems and Networks group, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

Some reminders…

RS Community coffee continues weekly via Zoom - check our Slack workspace for exact times and connection details.

The Research Computing Service’s weekly clinics are now running online via Teams. Research computing questions from all members of the Imperial community are welcome - from HPC to software engineering.

Get in Touch, Get Involved!

That’s all for this month. Thanks to everyone who suggested links for this edition.

Drop us a line with anything you’d like included in the newsletter, ideas about how it could be improved… or even offer to guest-edit a future edition! rse-committee@imperial.ac.uk.

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 issue of the Research Software Community Newsletter was edited by Adrian D’Alessandro. All previous newsletters are available in our online archive.