This month has seen the first integration of an analog photonic AI processor into an operational HPC system at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre and NVIDIA becoming the first $4 trillion company. The rise of AI continues, and along with it the huge demand for the software, the data, the computing infrastructure and, of course, the people, that drive the models and tools that underpin the AI revolution. In the research community, that means it’s a great time to be an RSE, whether you work with AI or not! In this month’s edition of the newsletter, we have the usual mix of dates for your diary and articles to check out, along with a report on our STEP-UP RSLondon Conference that took place in early July. This year’s conference brought together more than 140 digital Research Technical Professionals from universities and other organisations across the London region, and beyond - find out more in the news section below and, if you were there, we hope you enjoyed the event. With July coming to a close, we’re also approaching holiday time for many so, whether you’ve taken a break already, have one coming up, or are planning to make the most of the quieter time to focus on your work and maybe learn some new skills too, we wish you a great rest of the summer.
In this month’s research software community newsletter:
In-person registration for RSECon25 is planned to close on Thursday 31st July so there’s still just time to register if you’d like to attend this year’s event in person. The conference takes place at the University of Warwick, Coventry, from 9th to 11th September 2025. There’s also the opportunity to register for online attendance for which registration closes on 31st August.
The STEP-UP project will host an event on “Recognising research software: licensing, credit, and quality” on Thursday 4th September, 12:30-17:00. Further information and registration
IEEE Cluster, the International Conference on Cluster Computing, is coming to the UK. This year’s conference, IEEE Cluster 2025, will take place in Edinburgh, on the 2nd-5th September 2025.
CoSeC - the Computational Science Centre for Research Communities - is running a second cohort of its CoSeC Fellowship Programme. If you’d be keen to highlight CoSeC’s work around the development of software to enhance computational research within your research community, fellowship applications close on 5th September 2025.
The EOSC Symposium 2025 takes places in Brussels, 3rd-5th November 2025. EOSC is a federation that is working to advance open science within Europe, including the development of support for FAIR research outputs. There is currently a call open for lightning talks and demos with a submission deadline of 5th September 2025.
In late November/early December, two European countries will host research software day events. On Tuesday 25th November, the National Research Software Day 2025 event will take place in the Netherlands (abstract submission deadline 5th September). On Thursday 4th December, the Research Software Engineering Day 2025 will take place at KU Leuven, Belgium (call for contributions closes 15th September).
Registration is now open for the hybrid townhall event launching the Careers and Skills for Data driven Research (CaSDaR) project. The event will take place on Thursday 18th September 2025, from 09:30 to 16:30, at The Library of Birmingham and online. The event will present the current landscape of Data Stewardship in the UK, introduce the mission and goals of CaSDaR, gather input on what support and recognition is needed, and launch a funding call to support Data Stewardship initiatives. Further information and registration.
The Software Sustainability Institute’s next Research Software Camp will focus on Careers and Skills in Research Software. It will include a series of online events taking place between the 10th and 21st November 2025. Further information will follow in due course but now is a great time to mark the dates in your diary if this is a topic of interest.
And finally, a reminder of a couple of other events that we highlighted last month that you can still register to attend:
The NES Col-Lab Retreat will be held in Schoorl, the Netherlands, from 27th to 29th August 2025. It will bring together researchers, data stewards, software engineers and support staff with an interest in the Natural and Engineering Sciences. Full details, including pricing and registration, are available on the event website.
There is an interesting satellite event – Back to Fortran Future 2 – organised as part of RSECon25. It will take place in person only on Monday, 8th September 2025, and there is no charge to attend. The workshop will explore practical ways the Fortran-based scientific community in the UK and beyond can enhance the quality of Fortran scientific software and improve software engineering practices. Registration is now open.
This month, in our series highlighting members of the Imperial community helping to support research computing, we hear from Ian McInerney:
I joined Imperial as a staff member in January 2023 as a research software engineer in the Vibration University Technology Centre in the Mechanical Engineering department. My primary focus is the ongoing maintenance and development of multiple pieces of Fortran software for modelling vibrations and flows in jet engines. These software tools are actively used by our industrial partner in their design workflows - providing concrete impact to the work we are doing in the centre! In addition to my RSE position, I work with the Space Magnetometer Lab in the Physics department to develop the FPGA code for the magnetometers that will fly on the HelioSwarm NASA mission.
Before becoming an RSE, I studied Electrical Engineering in the US, working on low-level hardware doing circuit design and embedded/FPGA programming. I moved to Imperial in 2017 to join the HiPEDS CDT (Centre for Doctoral Training in High Performance, Embedded and Distributed Systems) in the EEE department, finishing my PhD in 2021. My research focused on numerical methods for control systems and optimization solvers, and how to do hardware-software co-design to improve the performance of both the hardware and the software. Afterwards, I spent a year as a postdoc at the University of Manchester in the Mathematics department, working with mixed precision algorithms and stochastic rounding. During this time, I slowly migrated more towards the field of computational science/engineering and applied mathematics, with a keen interest in how we can reliably use hardware accelerators.
I am also a large user of, and contributor to, open source software, where I am a lead developer for the KiCad EDA suite, and a packager for Fedora Linux. I am also a maintainer of the OSQP optimization software, and one of the maintainers of the Julia languages’ binary ecosystem. I am a strong proponent of an “upstream first” approach to development, where I actively work with upstream projects to report and fix bugs, even debugging and writing patches to submit to upstream projects for review.
Overall, I consider myself a “full-stack” engineer - going from the circuit/PCB design, processor architectures and compiler stacks all the way to the final software (but not web apps :)) and the analysis of the actual numerical methods that we implement. Such a background makes being an RSE a fun position for me to be in, because I can see the commonalities across fields and work with our researchers to take advantage of the newer technologies and developments.
This month, our Research Software of the Month is rojak:
rojak is a distributed Python library and command-line tool for using data from weather models to forecast clear air turbulence (CAT). CAT is a form of aviation turbulence which the onboard weather radar cannot detect. Thus, pilots are unable to pre-emptively avoid such regions. As turbulence experienced whilst onboard an aircraft was the leading cause of accidents from 2009 to 2018, it poses a significant safety risk. This can be mitigated by forecasts which enable pilots to avoid CAT tactically.
This library is under active development to research how climate change affects the frequency and intensity of CAT. Specifically, to explore how this affects next-generation aircraft design and gust load alleviation systems, as well as whether turbulence is correlated with other atmospheric features, such as the likelihood of contrail formation. Currently, it supports computing more than 20 turbulence diagnostics and processing turbulence observations from commercial aircraft-based observations.
This software is currently being developed as part of my PhD, and I hope this might be useful to others tackling similar challenges. rojak is available through pip as rojak-cat or through the GitHub repository. It is also currently under review for publishing in JOSS. If you’re interested in using it, contributing to it, or simply curious to learn more, please feel free to get in touch. I warmly welcome any collaboration and feedback!
A poster on Evaluating the UK’s software ecosystem to explore more effective ways of supporting its maintenance and development by Richard Gunn, Sophie Janacek and Neil Chue Hong was presented at the recent Metascience 2025 conference in London.
The STEP-UP RSLondon 2025 Conference took place on the 7th July 2025 and a short report on the event follows below:
The STEP-UP RSLondon Conference 2025 took place earlier this month on Monday 7th July. Building on our previous five editions of the conference from 2019 onwards that were run under the RSLondonSouthEast name, this year’s event continued work started last year to develop our community from being largely research software focused to also representing people working in research data and research computing infrastructure-related roles. Updating the name of this year’s event enabled us to recognise the fantastic opportunity that the STEP-UP project is offering us in developing support for a wider group of “digital Research Technical Professionals (dRTPs)”, and in making it possible for us to run the event itself. To provide more space for abstract submissions from members of the wider dRTP community, this year’s event was the first to include three parallel tracks for part of the day. One track was run for each of research software, data and computing infrastructure/High Performance Computing (HPC)-focused talks. We also had a number of more general talks covering dRTP community-related topics which were scheduled in our morning plenary session.
This year’s conference was our biggest yet, with over 140 people attending on the day. Following a welcome and introduction from the conference co-chairs, Ilektra Christidi and Jeremy Cohen, we were delighted to welcome Professor Andrea Townsend-Nicholson from UCL who delivered our morning keynote talk on “Bringing the Virtual Human to Life”. Our morning and afternoon sessions included an excellent mix of community-related and technically-focused talks and we really hope that everyone who attended found something of interest in each of the sessions.
Beyond the talks themselves, a personal highlight of the event was the huge buzz of people chatting over refreshments at each of the coffee breaks and during lunch, taking the opportunity to meet collaborators, colleagues and contacts both existing and new.
Bringing the event to a conclusion, our closing keynote speaker, Dr Malvika Sharan, delivered a talk on “Shaping Research Culture Through Communities: Lessons from Open Science”. You can find links to Malvika’s slides, and the slides from many of the other talks delivered at the event, on our conference schedule page.
The conference organisers would like to thank UKRI-EPSRC for supporting the event through the STEP-UP project (EP/Y530608/1), and UCL for sponsoring our closing reception which provided a nice opportunity for attendees to conclude discussions from earlier in the day, and to chat with speakers from the day’s talks.
The STEP-UP RSLondon conference will be back in 2026. Look out for confirmation of the date for the 2026 event over the coming weeks.
Our community member, Hui Ling Wong, has written a blog post for the Software Sustainability Institute’s blog “Keeping Track: Version Control for Reproducible Research”. The post presents the first event in Imperial’s Research Software Conversation Series which took place on 22nd May 2025. Look out for details of the final event in the series on Research Software Documentation which has been postponed from 15th July and will take place in the coming weeks.
Also recently published by the Software Sustainability Institute are two very interesting blog posts with an international theme around understanding the landscape for RSE in different parts of the world. Jyoti Bhogal, one of this year’s SSI Fellows, reports on her recent visit to EPCC and the talk she gave on her fellowship project looking at the Research Software Engineering Landscape in Asia. Michael Umeokoli provides some Reflections on Research Software Engineering in Africa.
Do you ever think about how much water data centres (and AI resources, in particular, use?!). A pre-print article on Making AI Less “Thirsty” looks at this topic and provides some interesting examples of water usage associated with the computing power required for training and running AI models.
This month, Code for Thought podcast episodes have been released looking at the Open Research “dev room” at this year’s FOSDEM conference - Open Research at FOSDEM 2025 and, in the final episode for the current season, a look at some of the exciting work happening at the UK Met Office - A Service for All Seasons - the MetOffice UK.
Datavzrd is an open source tool that can significantly simplify the process of transforming tabular research data into a visual report. You can read a summary of the tool in this article on TechXplore, or take a look at the paper, “Datavzrd: Rapid programming- and maintenance-free interactive visualization and communication of tabular data” recently published in PLOS ONE.
If you’re interested in LLMs and, in particular, improving LLM responses with respect to specialist topics or private data, take a look at the Hitchhiker’s Guide to RAG with ChatGPT API and LangChain.
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a widely used technique for feature reduction in high-dimensional data. Take a look at this Gentle Introduction to Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in Python.
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.
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.
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This issue of the Research Software Community Newsletter was edited by Jeremy Cohen. All previous newsletters are available in our online archive.