Every year I nearly forget how beautiful London looks in the sun and now, after what feels like two solid months of rain, it’s a relief to finally see the sun again. A small reminder that spring is on the way! With brighter days (hopefully) ahead, this is also a good moment to start mapping out your conferences and training for the year. Take a look at the Dates for your diary section below for upcoming events and key deadlines, and feel free to share anything you’d like us to include in a future edition.
Also in this issue, we feature the new Digital Research Technical Champion Scheme at Imperial and the launch of ByteSized dRTP sessions. There’s also a selection of recent blog posts, including a practical account of scaling the NMR data hub in the chemistry department into a production service.
deRSE26 - the Conference for Research Software Engineering in Germany - will take place 3rd-5th March 2026 in Stuttgart, Germany. The call for abstracts is now closed but event registration is still open.
Registration open: RSE Asia Association’s Episode 2: Research Software and Environmental Research in Asia will be online, 11th March 2026, 07:00 - 08:00 UTC. This episode of the series will explore the role of research software in environmental research, with a focus on open sharing. There will be a discussion on how research software can be used to address environmental challenges in Southeast Asia. The session will also highlight the importance of open data sharing and collaboration among researchers and institutions in the Asian region.
Case study talk submissions open: The King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence and STEP-UP are running a workshop on Technical workflows for AI research: skills, challenges and future developments on 15th April 2026. The workshop will bring together researchers and digital Research Technical Professionals (dRTPs) to discuss how AI is changing the practical work of research. The event organisers are seeking submissions for short (10-minute) case study presentations that “…highlight research workflows that make use of LLMs or other AI tools and infrastructure to enhance, optimise or otherwise benefit the process of undertaking research”. See further details and submit your expression of interest for a case study talk by 9th March 2026 (23:59) and address any queries to ai-institute@kcl.ac.uk.
The Software Sustainability Institute’s Collaborations Workshop 2026 will take place in Belfast, 28th-30th April 2026. The CW26 team have recently announced the theme for this year’s workshop - Strengthening the Research Software Community. Get your tickets! See the workshop webpage for further details and registration.
Registration & Submissions Open: Durham HPC Days 2026! The Durham HPC Days will take place again in June this year, from the 15th-19th June 2026. This annual event brings together researchers, developers, and practitioners to explore the frontiers of high-performance computing, data analysis, and scientific innovation. Make sure to check out our summary video and website from 2025’s event for inspiration. Registration is now open and the submission deadline for talks is 13th March 2026.
RSECon26 marks the 10th annual conference for Research Software Engineering and will take place in Sheffield, 9th-11th September 2026. See the event’s Important Dates page for details on deadlines for abstracts and registration.
EGI (originally the European Grid Infrastructure), will be holding their 2026 conference - EGI2026 - in Ghent, Belgium, 21st-25th September 2026. They’ve released a save the date announcement.
This month, in our series highlighting members of the Imperial community helping to support research computing, we hear from Aleksandr Ostudin:
I’m Aleksandr Ostudin, a PhD student in the rEaCT CDT in the Department of Chemistry, and what I do can be best described as making software for making things - or, in a fancy way, cyberphysical systems design.
I started my path with a BSc in Petrochemical Engineering, planning processes to maximise the objective in dollars for a given input in barrels. In the following years I continued my education with MSc in Industrial Chemistry, and worked multiple jobs related to chemical industry, including at an actual oil refinery, R&D consulting firm and governmental investment fund.
However, my passion for abstract thinking and big “what if’s” ultimately led me to academia, where I worked as a research engineer, developing a closed-loop setup based on machine learning for automated synthesis of nanoparticles. This project involved both physical and digital world development, and, most interestingly, unifying those two. Originally working more on the reactor engineering and it’s control software, I gradually expanded my competence to the other fields, such as algorithm design and data processing.
Those aspirations led me to Imperial, where I continue developing similar closed-loop setups for chemical reactions, focusing deeply on unsupervised feedback sub-systems - how can we make robots understand what have they done, best translating real-world signals into variables of the optimisation problem?
Apart from that I love bothering people with philosophical debates, edgy thought-experiments and semi-hidden symbolisms of arts in a historical context. A zealous AI-optimist, I believe that my efforts in building smart robotics will increase the overall happiness of humanity in its updated, cyberphysical form.
This month, our Research Software of the Month is boileroom, developed in the Department of Materials.
The field of deep learning for protein modelling is advancing rapidly, with new structure prediction models, protein language models, and generative design tools appearing on a regular basis. This pace of progress, however, brings substantial software engineering challenges: dependency conflicts between models that require incompatible library versions, CUDA and hardware compatibility breakages across GPU generations, and the quiet obsolescence of tools that may still be scientifically valuable for specific protein families or tasks. At the same time, no unified interface exists to swap models in and out of a design pipeline without rewriting integration code. boileroom is an open-source Python package that addresses these problems by providing a single API for running diverse protein prediction models — currently ESMFold and ESM-2 in stable release, with Boltz-2 and Chai-1 available in alpha — while isolating their conflicting dependencies inside containers so they never pollute the user’s environment. The package was developed as the inference backend for BAGEL, a modular framework for programmable protein design that formalises the design task as optimisation over a user-defined energy landscape, published in PLOS Computational Biology.
Two execution backends are supported by boileroom: Modal, a serverless cloud GPU platform for which academic credits are readily available, and Apptainer, enabling containerised execution on local HPC clusters. This dual-backend architecture means researchers can run state-of-the-art protein models without managing complex GPU environments or resolving Python dependency conflicts — the heavy machine learning libraries are loaded only inside containers, keeping the user-facing installation lightweight. Unlike commercial inference services that wrap open-source models and charge a margin on compute, boileroom is designed to let academics pay directly for cloud compute or use their own institutional GPU resources. Running locally via Apptainer also eliminates network latency, which matters when a design campaign may require tens of thousands of model evaluations. The project’s longer-term vision extends beyond folding and embedding models to support any deep learning model useful in a protein engineering workflow, including inverse folding models such as ProteinMPNN, and diffusion-based generators such as RFdiffusion and BoltzGen.
The continued development of boileroom has been supported by the Imperial Research Software Engineering (RSE) Team through an Open Source Booster engagement, in which an RSE Team member has been conducting a code audit to ensure the package can reliably and sustainably scale to incorporate new models at a faster pace without accumulating technical debt. This collaboration aims to put in place robust software engineering practices that will support boileroom’s growth as the ecosystem of protein prediction models continues to expand.
Digital Research Technical Champion Scheme: The UKRI-funded STEP-UP project is looking to build a team of enthusiastic researchers from across Imperial who would like to inspire and engage their peers with new and interesting technical topics, tools and ideas. Champions will plan and undertake activities to help raise the profile of research software, data and computing infrastructure best practices within the research community at Imperial. The primary requirement for the role is enthusiasm for supporting a community of peers and learning new skills in research software, data or infrastructure. You don’t need to be a software, data or infrastructure expert when you start, just to have an interest in your chosen area, especially if you work in a discipline which does not traditionally have a computational focus. Apply here by 16th March 2026. Download the full role description here.
ByteSized RSE has become ByteSized dRTP: February saw the first session in a new series of ByteSized dRTP (digital Research Technical Professionals) short-format training sessions, supported by the STEP-UP project. Keep an eye on the ByteSized dRTP page for details of upcoming sessions.
The 2026 International RSE Survey is open for submissions until 20th March 2026. The RSE Survey produces an incredibly valuable trove of data that anyone can use to understand the RSE community, including national associations, funders and policymakers. Please support the RSE community by completing the survey.
A recent blog post from the AI for Chemistry Hub, AIChemy, discusses the infrastructure challenges and solutions behind scaling up a research data management service for the 300 users of the NMR Facility: The Road to Production: How NOMAD Became Our NMR Data Hub
SSI Environmental Sustainability Policy: The Software Sustainability Institute’s (SSI) Environmental Sustainability Policy is now live. Read their blog post launching the policy, with links to the policy itself.
Equality, Diversity, Inclusivity and Accessibility in RSE: An important blog post sharing some background on research undertaken with members of the UK RSE community, outlining components and criticisms of EDIA initiatives, and offering the approaches the authors believe most likely to lead to improved equity in RSE specifically and in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) more broadly. Equity, Diversity, Inclusivity and Accessibility in Research Software Engineering: Guidelines for Making a Difference
A blog post summarising the recent event on Connecting Research Data and Software Communities co-organised by the STEP-UP project, the University of Cambridge Research Data Team and Reproducible Research Cambridge gives a great overview of the day’s discussions plus key take-home messages.
Several Episodes of the RSE podcast Code for Thought were posted this month, including an episode on Making Software Count, in which initiatives for making software, digital data and other artefacts count for more in research culture are discussed.
FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting) is now over for this year, but videos of talks are becoming available as they are processed. Check out the FOSDEM 26 event page for links.
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:
The Research Computing and Data Science team at Imperial’s Early Career Researcher Institute run workshops in programming, statistics, data science, software engineering, Linux, HPC, AI for programming, LaTeX, and much more, which are available to the Imperial community. Follow the registration information on the RCDS page to sign up.
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 Daniel Davies. All previous newsletters are available in our online archive.