We always aim for this introduction to the newsletter to be positive, encouraging and heart lifting in one way or another, but I have to admit I am lately struggling to find positive things to talk about, considering the state of the world. From terrible wars and atrocities, to leaders with questionable and sinister motivations, going through rampant intolerance all over the world and a diverse range of natural disasters that, invariably, affect most to those who are already in despair. It is hard to find reasons to justify the value of what we do, comfortably seated in front of our laptops, but equally hard to think on anything actionable that we could actually do to fix any of the above.
There is not really an answer that fits everyone’s needs or interest, but if you have one, share it. Go out there and talk to people. We do not talk enough with each other any more.
I leave you with a few events, news and posts that will hopefully fill your working hours over the coming months.
The WHPC London chapter invites you to the Navigating technology in industry and academia – Afternoon Tea on Thursday 4 September 2025, 14:00-16:00, at Imperial College London. Industry speakers from Lenovo (Kate Steele), and Teresa Schofield, a Freelance Chartered Electronic Engineer whose fields of interest include semiconductor and software technologies, RISC-V, HPC and Open Source will talk a bit about their careers and the work they currently do and how they came to be in the HPC realm. The floor will then open for a panel discussion followed by a networking session with afternoon tea refreshments. More information and registration.
The STEP-UP project will host an event on “Recognising research software: licensing, credit, and quality” on Thursday 4th September, 12:30-17:00 in-person at Imperial College London (South Kensington campus). 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.
On Thursday 16 October, 10:00-17:00 the ICICLE Ecosystem event will take place at the Scale Space, White City Campus. ICICLE is the Intel Corporation, Imperial College and Lenovo collaboration which was started for the tender of HX1 (High Performance Compute) and now the new HX2 (High Throughput Compute) and HX3 (HEX-AI) systems coming later this year. In the morning, there will be an introduction from Intel and Lenovo on how to make use of their technology for your AI workloads. Then, in the afternoon, there will be the opportunity to discuss more specifically with these partners in more domain-specific subjects and to dive deeper into the practical aspects of working in this way. Register your participation in either of the sessions or the whole event.
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.
This month, in our series highlighting members of the Imperial community helping to support research computing, we hear from Dr Aurash Karimi:
I joined Imperial as a Research Software Engineer in the ICT department in August 2025, where I’m currently working on the DUNE project, building a frontend for their control system for running neutrino experiments. I’ve been part of the Imperial community since 2022, when I joined as a research associate in mechanical engineering leading the development of PogoPro - a Qt/C++ ultrasound simulation package that bridges the gap between academic research and commercial application.
My journey to RSE has been quite varied, taking me through materials science, quantitative finance, and optimisation models in the steels industry. I completed my PhD in Engineering at Warwick, where I used Density Functional Theory and Kinetic Monte Carlo methods to model atomic-scale processes in iron - work that gave me deep appreciation for HPC systems and computational efficiency. After my PhD, I spent time developing machine learning models for steelmaking processes and working on financial derivatives pricing, before finding my way back to Imperial where I could combine my passion for research and robust software development.
I’m motivated to build maintainable research software that advances scientific knowledge and promotes software engineering best practices in academic environments. I enjoy the opportunity to tackle research challenges across different scientific disciplines - whether it’s particle physics, ultrasonics, or financial modelling – and helping to accelerate the research with my software expertise. I think the scientific community has made great strides recently to improve on the existing approaches to maintaining research software, but since researchers spend 30% of their time developing software and 40% of their time using software, there is still a lot of room for improvement and potential to accelerate research further through promoting efficient and maintainable software ecosystems.
This month, our Research Software of the Month is something quite different to what we are used to, Fermat’s Last Theorem (FLT):
FLT is an open source mathematical library, hosted on GitHub. The library is written in a programming language called Lean, and it is quite unlike most other mathematical software libraries in that it does not contain routines and algorithms for solving mathematical problems, it contains theorems and proofs. For Lean is a language rich enough to express the concept of an axiomatic mathematical argument. If Lean code representing a mathematical proof happens to compile, then the proof is correct. Proofs written in this way are said to be “formalized”.
The code at FLT is an ongoing effort by a group of people, led by Kevin Buzzard in the mathematics department, to formalize a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Fermat’s Last Theorem is the claim that a certain simple-looking equation has no solutions in positive integers; it was a mathematical question which was open for 350 years and its resolution in the 1990s by Andrew Wiles made the front page of the New York Times. Wiles’ first proof contained an error, which was fixed a year later in a joint work with Richard Taylor, Buzzard’s PhD supervisor at the time. Formalizing the proof will guarantee that there are no further errors.
But this is not the main reason for formalizing the proof. AI is becoming better at mathematics; however, mathematics is an extremely unforgiving branch of science. For a mathematical argument to be correct, every claim in it must ultimately follow from the axioms, and one error can invalidate an entire piece of work. Language models are still prone to hallucinations, so currently are not scaling to the extent that they can write long proofs. Teaching language models to write Lean code will ensure that they cannot make any mathematical errors. However training data is currently sparse. This and other libraries can hopefully be used to get language models up to speed with modern research mathematics.
On Thursday 14th of August, the Imperial College London Research Software Engineering community hosted the third session of the “Research Software Conversation Series: Tools and techniques for modern research in different domains” titled “Research Software Documentation”. This meetup explored the importance of documentation in research software, the challenges faced in writing it, and the best practices to follow. Have a look at the summary of the event prepared by our colleague Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal.
Have you ever heard of the TADA! principles? No? Really? Neither did I, until I found this brilliant and straight to the point collection of suggestions to make your code - researchers’ code, in particular - Transferable, Accessible, Documented and Annotated. You can read the pre-print paper now.
Would you like to automate some task in GitHub, but not with complex manual workflows, but rather by “talking” to it, in a comment? Slash Commands might be what you are looking for. True, you still need a workflow behind, but the interaction with it is very much like talking to a colleague. Give it a try and see where you can go with it!
No new episode this month in the Code for Thought podcast except to welcome the new season and giving us a glimpse of what to expect this Autumn! The first episode will air on the 2nd September, so stay tuned!
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.
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.