Term has finished and holiday time is here, or approaching, for many people. The sun has also arrived! If you’ve been on campus in the last couple of weeks, you’ll have noticed that it feels much quieter, even with the many visitors who are around. Despite this, July has actually been a very busy month for research software activities. We held our annual Research Software London workshop two weeks ago and the Beyond Open Research project’s Research Software Champions, who have been finishing off their work in the last couple of weeks, have been running a range of workshops in June and July. This has provided a fantastic range of opportunities for researchers in departments around the university to learn new skills, grow their knowledge of best practices and get an introduction to topics such as AI and software design.
We’ve also just held our first research software community get-together for quite some time and it was great to have 10 people joining us for refreshments and a chance to chat about software and HPC (and guitars!). We’re hoping to make this a monthly get together and if you’re around in August, do join us for our next get-together on Monday 19th.
There’s still just time to register for and attend our next online talk in the DiveRSE seminar series! Taking place on Tuesday 31st July at 15:00 BST, Ella Kaye, University of Warwick and Malvika Sharan, The Alan Turing Institute will have “A conversation about Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility (EDIA) in the RSE community: reflections on successes and challenges”. Register via Zoom to receive a link to join the seminar.
The UNIVERSE-HPC project’s pilot training course on OpenMP and the Message Passing Interface (MPI) is taking place online, 12:30-16:00 BST, each day of the week of Monday 12th-Friday 16th August. The course is free to attend. Further details and registration.
Our next Imperial Research Software Community get-together will take place on Monday 19th August 2024, 10:30-11:30. For details of the location and to be added to the invite, send us an email or look out for information on Slack.
RSECon is the major annual event for the research software community. This year’s event, RSECon24, is taking place 3rd-5th September 2024. While in-person tickets are sold out and a waiting list is in operation, you can still register to join the conference online. This is definitely worth considering if you’ve missed the in-person registration deadline or are unable to attend the event in Newcastle in-person. The deadline for registration for remote attendance is 23rd August 2024.
This year, Imperial’s central RSE team is planning to host two in-person events during Hacktoberfest (during week 1 and week 4 of October). The events will be open to anybody interested in writing code. The details of the events are still to be finalised, but you can already submit an expression of interest and there’s also an opportunity to let us know (via the form) if you have any open source projects you’re working on that you’d be keen to have others contribute to as part of Hacktoberfest.
SuperComputing 24 (SC24), the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, takes place from 17th-22nd November 2024 in Atlanta, GA, USA. It’s still possible to submit posters until 9th August 2024, although most other submissions have now closed. You can find full details of remaining submission options and deadlines on the submission site.
Computing Insight UK (CI-UK) 2024 takes place 5th-6th December 2024 in Manchester, UK. Abstracts are currently being accepted for presentations at the event and the abstract submission deadline is 13th September 2024.
This month, we break with our usual approach of profiling members of the Imperial research software or research computing community in this slot, to provide a report on this month’s RSLondonSouthEast 2024 workshop.
On Tuesday 16th July 2024, we welcomed a large community of research technical professionals, researchers and people in a variety of other related roles to Imperial’s Department of Computing for RSLondonSouthEast 2024, our 5th annual Research Software London community workshop. With around 120 people registered, this was our biggest workshop yet and we were delighted to again have the support of our sponsors, EPSRC (the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council), through the STEP-UP Strategic Technical Platform project, and the Society of Research Software Engineering, who helped to make the event possible.
Since our first workshop back in 2018, we have built a strong community around these regional events and it’s great to see many regular attendees from previous years as well as there always being a significant number of first time attendees - a sign that the community of people undertaking technical work within the research community in London and the South East of England is growing and developing rapidly.
As usual, the event provided a mixture of talks and lots of opportunities for discussion and networking among the participants (see the schedule). Things kicked off with a brief introduction from the co-chairs, including an overview of the STEP-UP project, followed by a keynote from Dr Marion Weinzierl, Institute of Computing for Climate Science, University of Cambridge, looking at developing leadership from within the RSE community and how technical professionals can define their own place within the wider research community.
A new aspect of the event this year, replacing our previous discussion session, was a panel session focused on digital Research Technical Professionals (dRTPs). Beginning with lightning talks from panellists representing four different areas within the digital RTP space - software, data, computing infrastructure and research engagement - the session continued with the audience asking questions about a range of topics via the “slido” web-based tool. Our panel chair, Dr Martin O’Reilly from the Alan Turing Institute, then put audience questions to the panel which also included a representative from EPSRC to offer a funder perspective. This session generated a lot of interesting discussion and helped to support our event theme of “widening the community” beyond research software to representing the wider digital RTP community. Completing our line up for the event was a series of excellent presentations, delivered in a pair of morning and afternoon talk sessions, and selected from submitted abstracts. The talks covered a wide range of different topic areas, from code generation, to managing Magnetometer data for the Solar Orbiter spacecraft, to data analysis for greenhouse gases, as well as detailing initiatives and processes around training and technical management. During the breaks, attendees had a chance to look at the posters that were on display and to vote on their favourite! A panel of judges also assessed the posters leading to prizes for the best posters, as decided by the judging team, and an audience choice award for the poster receiving the most votes from the attendees. Many congratulations to our poster prize winners. 🎉
Finally, we’d like to offer a big thank you to all our presenters, participants, helpers, organisers and the members of our programme committee who reviewed abstract submissions, and we look forward to our next workshop in 2025.
Our “Research Software of the Month” feature is taking a summer break! We’ll have more interesting research software tools and applications to tell you about in the coming months.
In the meantime, we’d again like make a call for suggestions of software to include in our RSotM feature in future newsletters. Do you have a piece of research software that you work on and you’d like to see highlighted in this section? Have you used other research software, that has an Imperial link, that you’d like to tell the community about? Maybe you are using some open source software as part of your research workflow that doesn’t have a link to Imperial but you think is something we should all know about!
You can get in touch with us to offer your suggestions for RSotM at rse-committee@imperial.ac.uk.
Ryan Smith, Senior Research Software Engineer in Imperial’s central RSE Team, is starting a Community of Practice focused on Mass Spectrometry data analysis and software engineering. The aim of this community is to create a collaborative environment where researchers can share knowledge, best practices, and resources related to data analysis and software development in the field of mass spectrometry. If you are interested in getting involved, reach out and help Ryan bring this initiative to life. If you have colleagues or Imperial collaborators working with Mass Spec, do highlight this new opportunity to them and see if they might like to get involved.
There are currently two exciting research computing-related job opportunities open at Imperial:
Senior Research Software Engineer in Computational Fluid Dynamics based in the Department of Aeronautics.
📝 Contract type: Full-time - open ended
💷 Salary: £54,927 - £65,935 per annum
🗓 Closing date: Wednesday 15th September 2024
You will play a key role in supporting the development of scientific code, liaising and working closely with local researchers to understand their requirements and develop software outputs. You will contribute to enhancing the sustainability and maintainability of the Department’s Computational Fluid Dynamics ecosystem consisting of a variety of flow solvers developed across different research teams (PyFR, Nektar++, Xcompact3d).
Full details are available on the Imperial jobs site.
Senior Research Community Manager, based in the Department of Computing, to support the STEP-UP project, a collaboration between Imperial, UCL, King’s and Westminster:
📝 Contract type: Full-time, fixed-term until December 2027
💷 Salary: £54,927 - £65,935 per annum
🗓 Closing date: Wednesday 14th August 2024
STEP-UP is our new UKRI-EPSRC (UK Research and Innovation, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council)-funded regional platform developing approaches to enhance the career and training opportunities available to digital Research Technical Professionals (dRTPs). We are looking for a proactive leader with community and project management experience to manage and grow our existing regional research software community into a diverse, inclusive and engaging group supporting digital Research Technical Professionals (dRTPs). This role will also involve undertaking project management and overseeing a range of project activities.
Full details are available on the Imperial jobs site.
From 16th September 2024, single sign-on will be enforced for the Imperial College London GitHub organisation. Make sure you’re ready for this change by completing the tasks below. Information on how to complete these tasks can be found in this knowledge article.
Finally, a reminder of the rolling GTA opportunity to pitch an exemplar for the ReCoDE (Research Computing and Data Science Exemplars) project that is led by the Graduate School at Imperial.
Members of Imperial’s Research Software Engineering Team have published a blog post on their Highlights from PyData London 2024
OSSci (opensource.science), an initiative run through NumFOCUS, is undertaking a range of activities to support open source within science. Check out their Map of Open-Source Science (MOSS) which provides some impressive visualisations of the open source ecosystem covering aspects such as the links between projects, outputs and the people developing them.
Imperial’s Department of Earth Science and Engineering has developed a “Primer on Programming in Python and Mathematical/Computational Techniques for Scientists and Engineers”.
A group of members of the UK research software community recently represented UK research institutions at the OSPOs for Good 2024 Symposium that was held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. David Pérez-Suárez from UCL’s ARC group has written a blog post on the event.
Jonathan Dursi’s recent blog post “We Need To Talk About AI” highlights the challenges that research computing / RSE teams face in engaging with AI developments and why this is important.
Amongst the new episodes of the Code for Thought podcast released this month is a discussion with Spyridon Trigazis from CERN on how they use OpenStack and Kubernetes within their infrastructure - “CERN: Keeping the lights on with OpenStack and Kubernetes”.
An interesting, recently published, article in Nature Computational Science - “Software in science is ubiquitous yet overlooked” - looks at the importance of the range of aspects, beyond code itself, that underpin the ecosystem of scientific software. This includes aspects such as engineering approaches, governance and licensing.
The Imperial Research Software Community Slack workspace is a place for general community discussion as well as featuring channels for individuals interested in particular tools or topics. If you’re an OpenFOAM user, why not join the #OpenFOAM channel where regular code review sessions are announced (amongst other CFD-related discussions…). Users of the Nextflow workflow tool can find other Imperial Nextflow users in #nextflow. You can find other R developers in #r-users and there is the #DeepLearners channel for AI/ML-related questions and discussion. Take a look at the other available channels by clicking the “+” next to “Channels” in the Slack app and selecting “Browse channels”.
If you want to start your own group around a tool, programming language or topic not currently represented, feel free to create a new channel and advertise it in #general.
If you need support with your code, seek no more! The Central RSE Team, within the Research Computing Service is here to help. Have a look at the variety of ways the team can work with you:
All the documentation, tutorials and howtos for using Imperial’s HPC are available in the Imperial RCS User Guide. See also the Research Computing Service’s Research Computing Tips series for a variety of helpful tips for using RCS resources and related tools and services.
Imperial’s Research Software Directory provides details of a range of research software and tools developed by groups and individuals at the College. If you’d like to see your software included in the directory, you can open a pull request in the GitHub repository or get in touch with the Research Software Community Committee.
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 Research Software Community Mailing List.
This issue of the Research Software Community Newsletter was edited by Jeremy Cohen. All previous newsletters are available in our online archive.