We experienced some cold days this month, at least in London. And as the temperature drops, particles slow down. The international research community feels a little like that too right now, with fewer events and less visible activity. Maybe it’s the weight of global challenges, as was pointed out in a previous newsletter. Or maybe it is just me feeling a bit disconnected from the wider community.
But cold doesn’t mean still. I believe that beneath the surface, ideas are moving, and there’s plenty to discover and do. Maybe autumn has its own rhythm. The festive season is just around the corner, and with it, the promise of renewed energy, more social interactions, and fresh opportunities to engage. For now, there are still interesting things to explore, and this newsletter brings together what’s happening next: events to mark on your calendar, updates from the community, and resources to keep you connected.
So take a moment, settle in, and see what’s ahead. And stay warm.
The Collaborations Workshop 2026 (CW26) will take place from Tuesday 28th to Thursday 30th April 2026 at the ICC Belfast and online. The theme this year will be “Strengthening the Research Software Community”. Early Bird tickets are available for a limited time, so secure your place soon.
The online Software Carpentry workshop organised by STEP-UP, in collaboration with the RSLondon community, has been extremely popular and is now sold out. However, we are still keen to find a few additional helpers. The three-day training will take place from Monday 8th to Wednesday 10th December 2025. If you’re available to join us as a helper for one of these days, please get in touch via rse-committee@imperial.ac.uk. For anyone who wanted to join the workshop as an attendee, the organisers will run the training again in February 2026, so follow them on social media or keep an eye on the STEP-UP events page to learn about the next dates.
The webinar “Integrating research software into open scholarly infrastructures: results of the SoFAIR project” will be held online on Thursday 11th December 2025. The SoFAIR project focuses on developing AI-assisted tools for extracting software mentions from research manuscripts. Attendance is free, but registration is required.
The DiRAC High Performance Computing Facility is organising a workshop, “Building novel methods for scientific computing”, to be held in person at Queen Mary University London on Tuesday 13th and Friday 14th January 2026. The event will cover a range of topics, from algorithms and accelerators to code sustainability, openness, and reproducibility. Registration closes Tuesday 16th December 2025.
Registration is now open for the Fortran hackathon on Monday 26th January 2026. It is organised by Fortran index and the Special Interest Group for Reasonable Performance Computing.
In the context of the Durham HPC Days 2026, Monday 15th to Friday 19th June 2026, you have time until Saturday 31st January 2026 to submit a workshop proposal on HPC and computational science topics. All the details are available on the website.
FOSDEM26, the Free and Open Source Software Developers European Meeting, is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. It will be held in Brussels on Saturday 31st January ** and **Sunday 1st February 2026. You don’t need to register, something you don’t see often in conferences!
If there is a programming language gaining a lot of attention lately, it is Rust. Rust Nation UK is a multi-track conference dedicated to it, and it will take place in London on Wednesday 18th and Thursday 19th February 2026. See the event website for registration and details.
There is still time to submit an abstract to the Sustainability Conference for Responsible Research Computing (SC4RC) 2026, taking place from Monday 4th Friday 8th May 2026 at CERN (Geneva, Switzerland) and online. Submissions close on Friday 27th February 2026.
This month, in our series highlighting members of the Imperial community helping to support research computing, we hear from Ben Fulton:
After earning my Bachelor’s degree from Indiana University in the USA, I worked for a series of small software startups hoping to hit a jackpot, earn several million dollars in stock equity, and retire to a South Seas island before turning 30. Along the way I built videogames, medical imaging databases, interaction managers and many other things, gaining expertise in web services, data management, and 3D rendering systems.
Unfortunately the stock options didn’t work out quite the way I had hoped, so I eventually returned to academia for a degree in bioinformatics. A master’s thesis on improving application performance using parallelism led to a position in the university High Performance Computing group, where I supported both high-performance software and HPC tooling, and had the opportunity to write papers on GPU usage, command-line efficiency, and reproducibility in HPC, as well as present workshops on parallel programming, deep learning, and practical coding techniques for researchers. At the same time I led the development of two respected open-source applications in evolutionary biology and had the opportunity to work with some of the leading evolutionary scientists in the field today.
Eventually I decided to look for opportunities outside of the US and landed here at Imperial College in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering. Since joining the team in August, I’ve been impressed by the innovative applications being developed here, and I’m looking forward to collaborating with students and faculty to advance performance and help turn the groundbreaking ideas that come out of the department into useful software.
This month, we have a slightly different contribution for our Research Software of the Month focusing on the “Visible HPC” mini-HPC cluster that’s been developed and built by Jeremy Cohen and Eirini Zormpa:
Prototype “Visible HPC” cluster makes its first event outing!
The Visible HPC concept is based on the fact that much High Performance Computing infrastructure for research is now hidden in remote data centres. Visitors to universities could, in the past, often take a tour of a machine room or computing facility and such opportunities have been the catalyst that inspired many current technical professionals to choose such a career path. Many of our current research computing experts were also able to develop their skills through hands-on access to on-site hardware, for example, undertaking an informal role as a systems administrator, while working as a researcher or research student in a research group. With infrastructure increasingly becoming centralised and hosted off-site, such opportunities are diminishing rapidly and we’re seeing increasing challenges in meeting the demand for people in research infrastructure roles.
This is why we created our prototype mini-HPC cluster which we’ve now taken on a successful test drive! Developed and funded through the DRIFT project, the Visible HPC cluster made its first event appearance at the DRIFT project hackathon held at the University of Cambridge on Friday 7th November 2025. The hackathon, organised in collaboration with the RSE East of England community, brought together a group of people interested in training for digital Research Technical Professionals (dRTP) who worked on a range of different hackathon activities, including opportunities to work with the cluster.
The Visible HPC scheme is being supported through work undertaken in a range of UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) projects including DRIFT, SCALE-UP where there are plans to support further cluster prototypes through the project’s flexible fund, and STEP-UP.
The cluster has been designed as a portable resource that showcases a number of key features of data centre centre hardware, being hosted in a 19-inch rack format, with a power distribution unit, enterprise-class network switch and 32 Raspberry Pi 5 compute nodes in 1U rack-mount units, the format used by many computing cluster nodes. Making the resource portable will enable us to take it to institutions that don’t have easy access to HPC infrastructure and to run training for both research facilitators and managers, and for researchers and technical professionals, demistifying high-performance computing and showing how it can be used.
Our visible HPC GitHub repository is now publicly available and we’ll be developing and enhancing the material there over the coming months. In the mean time, we’d like to invite members of the community to submit GitHub issues highlighting ways that you think the cluster can be used to support and train our community. At this stage, we’re particular interested in ideas for example tutorials or software that could be run on the cluster to engage and upskill dRTPs and researchers around HPC.
Are RSEs becoming obsolete in the age of AI? Should we enthusiastically adopt it or resist? In the blog post “Is AI After My Job? Navigating the Future of Research Software Engineering”, the Software Sustainability Institute explores how AI might impact the role of Research Software Engineers, discussing automation, opportunities, and strategies for staying relevant.
And, if you want to better understand your AI competitors, try ChunkViz, a web-based tool for visualising text chunks and embeddings, useful for understanding large language model outputs.
Speaking of AI (pun intended), if you are looking for an open source multilingual text-to-speech model with emotion control and watermarking, check out Chatterbox. You can also find an overview on this website.
Starting with the 3.13 release, users can download and install the free-threading version of Python. The blog post “Python 3.14 and the End of the GIL” analyses the removal of Python’s Global Interpreter Lock and explains what this means for concurrency and performance.
If you are not ready to remove GIL from your Python, you can still rely on multiprocessing from the built-in python module concurrent. An interesting example on how to use it can be found in the blog post “How to Process 10k Images in Seconds”.
If you are looking for an easy way to create GUI applications in Python, check out the blog post “How to make graphical Python apps the EasyGUI way”. It offers a practical guide to building simple GUI apps using the EasyGUI module, ideal for quick prototypes and teaching.
Linux commands and utilities are often stable and reliable, which means they are not frequently updated to add new features. However, there are always novel alternatives worth considering if you want a more modern approach.
Skrub is a Python library that connects database tables directly to machine learning workflows. See it in action during the “Clean code in Data Science” presentation, given by Gael Varoquaux at the dotAI 2025 conference.
This month, the Code for Thought podcast episodes covered, among others, “PyMoDAQ: No more reinventing the wheel”, a free and open-source software to efficiently setup the acquisition program of experiments with Python and “Getting to grips with the Coding Interview”, offering practical advice for technical interview preparation.
After a while, The Alan Turing Institute has published a new episode of their Turing Podcast series, titled “Navigating Change, AI in Arctic Sea Ice Forecasting”. It explores how AI models like IceNet help to predict sea ice conditions and support conservation efforts.
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 Stefano Galvan. All previous newsletters are available in our online archive.