We are in full Autumn now and the parks and streets are all covered in beautiful yellows and browns. Although probably not that great for commuters that see their trains being cancelled because of leaves on the tracks, the colours are absolutely amazing. The end of October puts an end to the first month of the term and brings a lot of festivities, like Diwali, Halloween or All Saints Day, celebrated all around the world in different cultures. It also brings the change to winter time, meaning one hour less of light in the afternoons, making the days look shorter and darker.
This is the season of staying at home, warm and cosy, reading, talking to people, playing board games with friends and family, or coding. Of course, there are plenty of things to do software wise, some of them ready for you to join from your own laptop. Others, requiring for you to get out there and mingle, which is an essential part of human nature. ChatGPT is not that great at mingling. So have a look at what’s on offer, pick your favourite things, and relax with a mug of tea, coffee, hot chocolate… or hot toddy (but not during working hours.)
On Monday 4th November from 11.00 - 12.00 (GMT), the Research Computing Service will be hosting Robert Carver to talk on “Downshifting: Computing for systematic trading at institutional and retail level”. This will take place in Clore lecture theatre (213), Huxley Building, South Kensington Campus. More information about the talk and the speaker, as well as registration details can be found in the event page.
Our October Research Software Community Coffee meet-up will take place on Monday, 18th November 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.
The second episode of the series of meetups targeted at African and Asian researchers who code, organised by RSSE Africa and RSE Asia will take place on the 14th November 2024, 8:30 - 10:00 am UTC, dedicated to Enabling Reproducibility through Research Code. Please register to join for the second episode!
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 has been extended to the 18th November 2024.
Another upcoming SSI event is the Research Software Camp - Digital Skills for Research Technical Staff. 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.
The HPC Club kicks-off with their first formal event on Wednesday 27th of November, in Canary Warf. What it is about is up to the attendees to decide! Join this brand new HPC community and figure that out together! Details on the registration for the event will be published in the HPC Club webpage very soon.
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 Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal:
I am a Research Software Engineer at Imperial, part of the Central Research Software Engineering team, where I work on a variety of projects. In 2023, I was selected an International Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute. In 2021, the R Foundation funded my proposal to serve as a Technical Writer for the R Development Guide, helping to create and refine the guide. Later that year, I participated in Code for Science and Society’s Digital Infrastructure Incubator to build a community around the R Development Guide. In 2022, I contributed to another significant update during the Google Season of Docs. I have presented this work at various conferences, including useR! 2021, LatinR 2021 (as an invited speaker), CarpentryCon 2022, useR! 2024, and RSLondonSouthEast 2024.
My academic background includes an MPhil in Statistics from University of Pune, where I researched the Nested Sampling algorithm (used to sample from complex, multi-modal distributions while also estimating the evidence). In 2020, I was selected for Google Summer of Code working on the algorithm in Julia (programming language). I presented this project at JuliaCon 2021 and PackagingCon 2021.
Throughout my career, I have also been involved with various software engineering communities, including serving as a Subject Matter Expert for NASA TOPS’ Open Science Tools and Resources Module. In 2021, I participated in the Open Life Science program (cohort-4), where I co-founded the Research Software Engineering (RSE) Asia Association. I have represented the RSE Asia community at events in Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka (as Asia Pacific Advanced Network Fellow), and the UK. For my contributions to the RSE community, I was honoured with the RSE Impact Award at the Inaugural Community Awards by the Society of RSE in 2022. Recently, I also graduated from CSSCE’s Community Engagement Fundamentals course.
This month, our Research Software of the Month is SWMManywhere, developed in the Civil Engineering Department.
Urban drainage models simulate flooding due to extreme rainfall, enabling a modeller to test different storms, assess climate change impacts, and evaluate interventions such as increasing green spaces. However, because of the cost of surveying underground infrastructure, it is not typical that these models are available, particularly in areas where the pipes are very old.
SWMManywhere is a workflow that provides end-to-end synthesis of urban drainage models using openly available GIS data. It handles data acquisition and preprocessing, provides a customisable network derivation, and generates models for simulation with the SWMM software. Furthermore, it works anywhere in the world!
SWMManywhere has been co-developed by Diego Alonso Álvarez in Imperial’s central Research Software Engineering team from its inception. Compared to bringing RSEs on board after software development has taken place, as is more common, the authors say the difference in the quality of the final code is like night and day. The immediate goal for SWMManywhere is to publish a JOSS article, but there is broad ranging interest from other researchers and so we hope that it will become a self-sustaining open-source project.
More information about SWMManywhere can be found in the preprint article, the GitHub repository and the documentation.
Are you interested in software design patterns? And in finance? In his blog post on An example of a software design pattern for European option pricing using UML diagrams Benjamin Scharpf mixes both things and put them into practice via UML diagrams, a key tool to design your software better, as well as documenting relationships within.
This year the central RSE team at Imperial planned two in-person events during Hacktoberfest on the 1st and the 23rd of October. The events were open to anybody interested in participating in open source software, either coding or with non-code contributions. If you missed the events, here you have a summary of what was achieved.
An article recently published in Nature on “Six tips for going public with your lab’s software” discusses how to be successful when making your software public, when good quality is not enough, but usability, among others, becomes a key aspect.
Is code reusability a good thing? Always? Most will say “yes”, but there are dissenting voices. Have a look at this somewhat controverting post from a few years back on Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend.
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 Diego Alonso Álvarez. All previous newsletters are available in our online archive.