If you are reading this, you survived the August Heatwave. Well done!
After many weeks working from home, I have enjoyed drinking different types of teas, such as Rooibos and Jasmine Tea, that I recently discovered go very well with 90% cocoa chocolate.
More importantly, I have learned a number of important insights from the Research Software Community in our weekly coffee every Friday! Firstly, that there is a controversy between tea and coffee lovers in the community, as well a couple of individuals who need both psychoactive beverages to survive. Secondly, that Fortran will never die. Finally, that it can be difficult to find meaning in times of coronavirus, especially when the quick advances in machine learning make us question whether there is something unique in ourselves, humans.
Does free will exist? Will Fortran coded mad robots control the world and annihilate the humankind? Will we become irrelevant? Speculating around these questions won’t put us in the right direction. Instead, let’s have a look at the activities and material on which we have actual influence, and by the hopeful domination of the technology and the acquisition of knowledge we will have better odds of becoming superhuman cyborgs and saving the world.
Learn more about OpenACC, More Science, Less Programming in the OpenACC Summit 2020. The registration deadline is the 24th August.
Are you a Machine Learning Python Enthusiast who wants to build models that create positive impact for organizations and people? Don’t miss the PyTorch Global Summer Hackathon! The application deadline is the 25th August. Alternatively, store your code well and continue building robots to conquer the world.
Feeling courageous and wanting to make a positive impact on the national and international RSE community? Nominate yourself as a Trustee for the Society of Research Software Engineering. Nominations close on the 31st August.
The next IDEAS “HPC Best Practices” webinar on 9th September is Testing and Code Review Practices in Research Software Development.
Wanting to show the world how your hyper-efficient parallel Python code managed to optimize your coronavirus vaccine? Don’t miss the 9th Workshop on Python for High-Performance and Scientific Computing at SC20. Submissions close on 11th September. You can also show how your program burned cx2 multiple times before passing the tests.
Dream with decreasing your enthalpy by submitting your work to the Nordic RSE Conference, which is now open for proposals and will close on 15th September. The organizers are hopeful on proceeding with the conference in Stockholm on December 1-2.
The launch event for SORSE (an International Series of Online Research Software Events) is taking place 14:00-16:00 BST on Wednesday 2nd September. A lot of work has been put in to getting SORSE up and running over recent months to provide an alternative to the various RSE community conferences and events that have been cancelled and that we’ve all missed out on this year. This will be a great launch for the series with a short intro to SORSE followed by two 30-minute keynote talks:
Dr Mariann Hardey, Associate Professor, Durham University talk title: ‘Switching off the label “women in tech”’
Dr Kari Jordan, Executive Director, The Carpentries – talk title: ‘Building Inclusive Computational Communities’
Registration is now open.
You can find details of upcoming events that will take place in the weeks following the launch in the SORSE programme.
The next submission deadline is the 31st August.
Don’t forget to submit your contributions. Make Chris C-A proud of the participation of the Imperial College Research Software Community!
The Wishlists for the future of RSE blog post provides an overview of the outcomes from the discussion session that took place at the RSLondonSouthEast 2020 workshop earlier this year. A full report from the discussion session is available on Zenodo.
Solcore (Department of Physics and Research Computing Service) and PyBaMM (Department of Mechanical Engineering and Research Computing Service) were featured in the NumFOCUS July Newsletter
A gentle reminder that we post job RSE opportunities associated with IC in the #jobs channel on the Community Slack workspace
Major new release of Jupyter Book, which provides a means of publishing Notebooks on the web (see also nbviewer and fastpages)
Naming the Pain in Developing Scientific Software: a pre-print for submission to IEEE Software. Do any of these sound familiar??
The Research Software Encyclopedia: “A community driven, open source strategy to derive context-specific definitions of research software”
Simple BLAS: “A better simpler website to illustrate Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) operations”
Use a new feature from GitHub to build yourself a self-updating profile alongside your repositories - here are some more examples. If you create your own (perhaps including your RSE Phenotype?) then let us know and we’ll try to include in a future newsletter.
The frustrations experienced by a domain expert attempting to use an open source research software tool
Reflecting on which is the most appropriate turbulence model for your simulation? Check Fluid mechanics, turbulent flow and turbulence model course material made publicly available by Chalmers University of Technology.
Have a look on how OpenFOAM can be used to design optimal ventilation patterns that ensure a safe return-to-office minimizing the risk of COVID-19 spread
Pint nominated by Diego Alonso Álvarez. Thanks Diego for the contribution!
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a magnitude without units is meaningless. However, when coding, we systematically disregard any units except, maybe - if you are lucky - in the inputs to the software. Until now.
Pint is a Python package designed to enable the consistent use of units across your calculations. It lets you perform arithmetic operations and manipulation of physical quantities, not just numbers, providing the much-needed context and expressiveness to your code. Pint comes with an enormous list of units, which can be used on their own or as part of a units system (S.I., c.g.s, imperial…). It is highly modular, and let you add your own units… in the unlikely case the one you are looking for is not already implemented. As a final bonus, it has support for Numpy arrays, so there is no excuse for not giving it a try.
Cheers for the dimensional consistency!
Historical fact: since the beginning of the times, most OpenFOAM calculations are performed over the
dimensionedScalartype, which ensures dimensional consistency otherwise gives you a nasty compilation error.
Today is your very last chance to complete the Research Software survey and tell the Research Computing Service and Research Software Community about the challenges you face as a user or developer of Research Software at Imperial.
RS Community coffee continues weekly via Zoom - check our Slack workspace for exact times and connection details.
The Research Computing Service clinics are running online every week. Questions are welcome from all members of the Imperial research community - from HPC to software engineering.
The Research Computing Service’s Research Computing Tips continue to be published weekly and there is now a list of topics. Please contact Mark Woodbridge (m.woodbridge@imperial.ac.uk) with suggestions for future entries. The latest have been:
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 Felipe Huerta. All previous newsletters are available in our online archive.