The highlight of the last month was the annual UK RSE Conference, RSECon24. It’s an excellent opportunity to learn about the roles of Research Software Engineers (RSEs) and, more broadly, Research Technical Professionals (RTPs), meet like-minded people, and explore exciting new technologies and tools for research. Although I couldn’t attend in person, I joined online with another RSE who booked a meeting room with a projector. It was a great experience, provided you can agree on which talks to follow in the packed multi-session programme (and yes, we managed that!). A way to make remote attendance more engaging.
So, with so many topics already covered at the conference, what’s left to showcase in this September edition of the newsletter? Well, the development of research software never stops, and the community is always active. Expect news on upcoming events like Hacktoberfest, new opportunities to connect with fellow software enthusiasts, and the usual selection of Imperial-related and online resources. Enjoy!
This year, Imperial’s central RSE team is hosting two in-person events during Hacktoberfest: the 1st and 23rd October 2024. There are still a couple of physical spots for the 1st! For the 23rd, in-person sign-ups are open until the 15th, so don’t miss out. The events are open to anyone interested in contributing to open source, whether through code or non-code contributions. Bring your own project or support others. Submit your interest and find more details here.
The 33rd Helmholtz Platform for Research Software Engineering (HiRSE) Seminar will take place on 1st October 2024 at 14:00 CEST. Professor Wilhelm Hasselbring will present on the topic “Better Software Architecture, Better Software, Better Research”. The Zoom link will be shared via various platforms, including the UK RSE Slack.
The Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) has announced the launch of its 2025 Fellowship Programme, with applications now open. The deadline for applications is 7th October 2024. If you’re thinking about applying and would like advice or more information, several past SSI fellows at Imperial are available to help. Simply reach out to the community committee, and we’ll connect you with them.
Thursday 10th October 2024 marks International RSE Day! Remember to take a break and give yourself a pat on the back, knowing you are part of a large community, and what you do makes extraordinary research possible.
The RSSE Africa and RSE Asia communities are joining forces with other research software and open science communities to host a six-episode virtual meetup series targeted at African and Asian researchers who code. The series aims to raise awareness of good practices in research code, enhance the visibility of research coding projects from these regions, and stimulate conversation and engagement between researchers who code worldwide. The first episode of the series “A conversation with researchers who code” will kick off on the International Research Software Engineering Day, Thursday, 10th October 2024, 8:30 UTC. It is free to attend and open to all. Please register to join for the first episode!
Our October Research Software Community Coffee meet-up will take place on Monday, 21st October 2024, from 10:30 to 11:30 in the Senior Common Room (SCR) at South Kensington Campus. If you’d like to be added to the calendar invite for this and future sessions, feel free to get in touch. Otherwise, you’re welcome to simply drop by the SCR and look for the table with the Community Coffee signs! Refreshments will be provided, with orders placed shortly after the session begins.
Contributions are open for the fifth German Conference on Research Software Engineering (deRSE25), which will be held in Karlsruhe from 25th-27th February 2025. The deadline for abstract submissions is 28th October 2024.
Another upcoming SSI event is the Research Software Camp - Research Software Skills for Technicians. The camp will feature various activities running from 18th to 29th November 2024. Be sure to save the dates and stay tuned for more details soon.
The SuperComputing 24 (SC24) conference, an international event focused on high-performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis, will be held from 17th-22nd November 2024 in Atlanta, GA, USA.
Albuquerque, NM, USA, will host the 2nd Annual Conference of the US Research Software Engineer Association (USRSE’24) from 15th-17th October 2024. Find out more here.
The Research Software Engineers Day (RSEng24) will take place on 6th December 2024 in Brussels, Belgium. This event offers research software engineers the opportunity to come together, share their collective experience, and engage in a day filled with talks and workshops.
This month, in our series highlighting members of the College community helping to support research computing, we hear from Dr Aurash Karimi:
I am a Research Associate at the College in the non-destructive testing group of the Mechanical Engineering department. I work on the Pogo software ecosystem. Pogo is a proprietary GPU-powered ultrasound modelling tool written in C++ which is used in academia and industry primarily for non-destructive testing. My work spans multiple areas as the development aims to keep up with the biggest user demands, recently I’ve been working on the efficient 3D visualisation of large vector fields.
My research background includes a PhD in Engineering from the University of Warwick. There I used quantum-scale modelling (density functional theory) to study the thermodynamic and diffusion behaviour of nitrogen in iron with non-ideal structures. I’ve also taught a programming for Quantitative Finance module. So, I’m fortunate enough to appreciate the mathematical similarities between the diffusion of atoms and asset-pricing models. One of the main reasons I like research computing is the wide range of interesting topics you are exposed to.
Like many in the computing field I’ve been actively pondering how to integrate AI into my software development to make me more effective, and how it will affect the shape of research software in the coming years. I’ve also started an AI-driven website as a side project. I’m always happy to discuss about the future of technology and generally optimistic about the capacity for technology to uplift us as a species.
Our “Research Software of the Month” feature is taking a short break, but we’ll be back soon with more exciting tools and applications to showcase.
In the meantime, we’re inviting suggestions for future RSotM features. Do you have a piece of research software you’ve developed or used that you’d like to see highlighted? Perhaps you’ve worked with software that has an Imperial connection, or you use an open-source tool in your research workflow that you think the community should know about, even if it’s not linked to Imperial.
Please feel free to reach out to us with your suggestions for RSotM at rse-committee@imperial.ac.uk.
As mentioned, the beginning of September brought us RSECon24, the annual event that gathers research software enthusiasts from all over the UK - and beyond! It was an intense week of discussions and interactions with the broader RSE community on a range of topics from good practices in software development to publishing software papers. You can now read about the highlights of the conference in the latest Imperial RSE Blog, RSECon24: Growing a community, building a career.
The new Imperial Discussions is an organisation-wide forum where staff and students can connect with other members of the Imperial community on GitHub. You can use it to ask questions about GitHub or anything engineering related, ask for help with a project you’re working on, share ideas / feedback, and engage with other community members.
Reminder: if you are having trouble accessing the Imperial Discussion forum, it may be because single sign-on (SSO) has been enforced for the Imperial College London GitHub organisation since 16th September. To comply with this change, please complete the tasks below. You can find instructions in this knowledge article.
When it comes to backups, are you fully prepared? The Imperial Data Centre team has installed a new tape library, offering additional capacity for new tape drives and higher-capacity tapes. You can find the updated pricing structure on the “file sync, recovery and backup webpage”.
A new blog post on the Science and Engineering South blog, “Supporting digital Research Technical Professionals: Building a community, shaping careers” talks about the STEP-UP Strategic Technical Platform project.
An article recently published in Nature on “The Human Costs of the Research-Assessment Culture” highlights some of the challenges of the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise and the work being done through the hidden REF which many people in the RSE community will be familiar with.
This month, the code for thought podcast is going international with episodes in German and, for the first time, in French. And don’t miss the episode on how Imperial is striving to go “Beyond Open Research”.
There is a new episode of the Turing Way fireside chat series available online: “Addressing mental health in academia” co-hosted by Dragonfly Mental Health.
Did you know that under certain conditions, you can access data from deleted forks, deleted repositories, and even private repositories on GitHub? This is a deliberate design choice, so it’s important to be aware of it to avoid unintentionally disclosing sensitive information. This blog post provides some clear examples.
Tach lets you define and enforce dependencies between Python modules within your project. And nicely visualise them.
MarCLIdown is a minimalist shell program that prints a markdown file in a formatted text output in Linux terminal.
Are you a C++ expert looking to delve deeper into the language’s mechanisms? You might find this ongoing series of blog posts on undefined behaviours interesting: from part 1 of 11 to part 5 of 11.
If you’ve ever considered increasing HPC wall-time to accommodate longer processing instead of optimising performance, you’re in surprising company. This article discusses how a research AI model unexpectedly tried to modify its own code to extend runtime.
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 Stefano Galvan. All previous newsletters are available in our online archive.