Welcome to the May newsletter from The Society of Research Software Engineering! Our monthly newsletter will announce new Society initiatives, gather RSE news, events, blogs, papers, anything interesting and relevant together in one place. If you would like to add an item or suggest a new section to the next newsletter, submit it via that short form or get in touch with Claire Wyatt, RSE Community Manager.

Each month, we’ll introduce you to three Trustees from the Society board and for May, we’re focusing on Mozghan Kabiri Chimeh, Claire Wyatt our RSE Community Manager and Tania Allard, our Diversity and Inclusion Chair.

Dr Mozhgan Kabiri Chimeh is a GPU developer advocate at NVIDIA helping to bring GPU and HPC to growing user community in Europe and around the world. She is a community builder with a passion for open source software and is actively involved in the HPC and RSE communities. As a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, and Research Software Engineer (RSE) advocate, she is actively promoting reproducible and sustainable software, use of HPC and particularly GPUs through training, seminars, research software consultancy, and outreach.

Prior to joining Nvidia, Mozhgan was a Research Software Engineer in Massive Scale Complex Systems Simulation with Accelerated Computing at the University of Sheffield, UK. She worked in the area of complex system modelling using emerging high-performance parallel architectures.

She is actively involved in outreach programs to encourage and empower minorities’ involvement at all levels within the HPC sector and is a long-standing Women in HPC volunteer, including leading WHPC’s workshop last year and this year at International Supercomputing Conference. Mozhgan has chaired several technical and scientific conferences and served as a committee member of high profile HPC conferences. She holds a Ph.D. in computer science and a master’s degree in Information Technology from the University of Glasgow, UK.

Claire Wyatt joined the University of Southampton in 2009 and until December 2015, she managed the Web Science Doctoral Training Centre. In January 2016, she moved roles to work as the RSE Network Coordinator based with the RSG team on the EPSRC RSE Network Grant. In this role, she worked on several successful new initiatives like the RSE Conference and RSE Leaders meetings. From the January 2019, Claire joined the Software Sustainability Institute as the Community Manager for Research Software Engineering and she serves as a trustee for the Society of Research Software Engineering. She has responsibility for many areas: delivering the annual RSE Conference and organising other events like the RSE Leaders meetings, creating and delivering the communications and publicity plans, working closely with the Membership Lead to encourage more members to join the Society and improve the membership offering and supporting the RSE Community to meet the community and Society’s goals. Claire is always looking for new initiatives that help the RSE Community, new ways to raise awareness and is very happy to get involved in new activities that the community needs so get in touch with her for a chat about an idea.

Tania Allard is an expert developer with over a decade of experience, a passion for speaking, teaching, and building healthy, welcoming and inclusive open communities. It is her mission to empower other developers of all backgrounds and experience levels through open-source software. She also has a track record for getting things done and helping others to succeed. As such, she is an avid mentor and advocate for the open-source, research software engineering and data science communities. She wears way too many hats at the same time, but for now, she is working as a Developer Advocate in Microsoft. She is also a visiting Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute and a Trustee for the Society for Research Software Engineering and the UK Python Association.

RSE Leaders Meetings – going online for a June meeting!

We support meetings for RSE Leaders twice a year, with the possibility of raising this to four times a year if there is the appetite for more. Both the private slack channel and the meetings are for leaders to share and discuss best practice confidentially.  No matter how small or large the group, the challenges are usually quite similar so this leaders network discusses on slack and meets in person (now online) the solutions that work, present interesting projects, share best practice etc. The meetings are informal with no note taking and all conversations are strictly confidential.  If you’d like to join the leaders slack channel and/or attend the next meeting, please get in touch with Claire Wyatt. There is also have a mailing list but this is mostly used to fix the meetings. Discussions are held on slack so as not to clutter inboxes.

The next online meeting will be in June chaired by James Grant in Bath and a doodle poll is out now to fix the date. Please fill out your availability in the doodle poll and a date will be chosen soon.

Membership to the Society

Sign up for membership! with direct debit being the current payment method. We are working with our membership platform providers to find a solution for other payment methods and we hope to have more information on that soon.

Currently the members benefits are:

• Support the work of the Society to further research software engineering
• Eligible to apply for any future opportunities for Society funding
• Opportunity for early registration to the Society annual conference
• Opportunity for early registration to any future Society’s professional and networking events
• Eligible to vote in Society decisions such as electing trustees or changing the constitution
• Eligible to stand for election as a trustee
• Eligible to be volunteer or be nominated for working groups or committees that the trustees may establish

Reminders:

Keep up to date – You can keep up to date with trustee meetings as we have shared a summary of Society monthly trustee meetings including the decision log.

RSE Vacancies – You can post an RSE role or a role supporting RSEs to the vacancy page on the Society website via a form.

RSE Group Updates – Recently two groups published their fantastic and inspiring Research Software Group annual report. Read all about their RSE team and their projects:- From Mark Turner, Head of Research Software Engineering at Newcastle University and Andrew Edmondson, Group Leader at the University of Birmingham. If you have a group or individual update that you’d like to share, please send it through to Claire.

RSE Slack

   More Slack channels – There are lots of slack channels in the RSE space that you can join so feel free to explore by clicking on the +  on the left hand side, next to ‘Channels’ and then ‘Browse Channels’.  Soon, we will be tidying up channels that don’t seem to be active anymore.  If you joined the slack space recently, you were automatically added to these channels:- #general, #random, #introductions – where we can all get to know each other more hearing about you and your work,  #jobs – where you can post and see new vacancies and #events– to read and post about any relevant interesting events.  From today, we will also automatically add new joiners to the #training channel.  If you’ve been here a while you might not be in those channels so use the + to join them and browse all the other channels available. We’d like to encourage everyone to introduce themselves in the #introductions channel…Connect to the RSE Community by joining the RSE Slack https://society-rse.org/about/contact/

Announcements

BEIS Survey on the impacts of COVID19 on research activity and the research community – deadline 9th June

The 1st ARCHER2 eCSE call

The 1st ARCHER2 eCSE call (ARCHER2 eCSE01) opened on the 19 May 2020. The deadline for submitting documents for technical evaluations is 16:00 on 16 June 2020, with the final deadline for proposal submission being 16:00 on 7 July 2020.

Scope

Through a series of regular calls, Embedded CSE (eCSE) support provides funding to the ARCHER2 user community to develop software in a sustainable manner, to run on the ARCHER2 system. Funding will enable the employment of a Research Software Engineer (RSE) to work specifically on the relevant software to enable new features or improve the performance of the code. More information here.

RSE Stories Podcast is coming to the UK/EU

(A new venture from Peter Schmidt, UCL).

Many of you will already be aware of the RSE Stories podcast. Vanessa from Stanford University in California/U.S. has been running the show successfully since 2019. She regularly invites a number of exciting guests to the show. Guests, who demonstrate the important work we research software engineers do, including in fields some of us may find surprising (see e.g. the ‘Software on the Farm’ episode).  I am a big fan of podcasts. They are a fantastic format to share ideas, discuss topics in depth, educate and, of course, entertain. Therefore, I am thrilled to announce that Vanessa and I will be working together and expanding the RSE Stories podcast to include shows hosted here in the UK/EU.

And there are a lot of stories to tell! For instance, how RSEs help research and combat the coronavirus/Covid-19.  Indeed, the first episode(s) will be discussing this with RSEs working in the field. But we will also look into different research fields and other aspects, challenges and opportunities of our work. The first episode of RSE Stories from the UK/EU should go live soon, so stay tuned.

As for my background, my own RSE Story if you wish: I joined the community of RSEs as recently as December 2019 at the University College London, UK. For me this was a move full circle back to academia. After all, my career as software engineer started in particle physics at the University Hamburg in Germany followed by a research fellowship for a medical imaging project at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London, UK.

At that time, the concept of a research software engineer did not exist. Therefore, when my research contract ended in 2000 I made the decision to move into the private sector. And for the next 19 years I worked in a range of different companies as software engineer, tech lead, engineering manager and software architect. From a technology perspective it was an exciting time and I had the privilege to work on some cutting edge software, including the rise of mobile apps and search engine optimisation.

Obviously, time did not stand still for software engineering in research either. But it was only in 2019 that I realised universities, including UCL, have been working hard to address the need for professional support in research software development. Through a colleague at Elsevier I joined the RSE Slack channel. And it was there that I saw the RSE job opening at UCL advertised in summer 2019.

The RSE movement is relatively young. And I suspect that many outside (and possibly inside?) academia are still unaware who we are and what we do. Not to mention the career opportunities that exist in this field.  Many of my colleagues and I feel that we need to put RSEs and our work firmly on the map.  I see the RSE Stories podcast as a good opportunity to spread the word.

Mentors needed for the GPU Hackathon!

Mentors are the lifeblood of the GPU Hackathon program. During each hackathon, participating teams are paired with mentors who have GPU programming expertise and work alongside the mentors to achieve their goals.  Our mentors come from universities, national laboratories, supercomputing centers, and industry partners. The success of these events relies on the expertise of our mentors and their willingness to share this knowledge with the participants. 

Interested in Becoming a Mentor?

As a mentor, you work with a team that intends to use a programming model—OpenACC, CUDA, OpenMP, Kokkos, or another—that you are familiar with. We typically pair two mentors per team so that skill sets and learning styles are balanced. Regardless of your level of expertise, these events are great opportunities to sharpen your skills, learn about the latest technologies, and collaborate with others in your community. Use the application form to get involved.

Research Software Hour

Hosted by members of the Nordic-RSE community, this continues weekly on Twitch. Research Software Hour is an online stream/show about scientific computing and research software. It is designed to provide the skills typically picked up via informal networks: each week, we do some combination of exploring new tools, analyzing and improving someone’s research code, and discussion. Watchers can take part and contribute code to us which we analyze and discuss on stream. We broadcast on Twitch Tuesdays at 20:30 Oslo time / 21:30 Helsinki time. More info here.

Recent News that is worth highlighting again:

Investigating & Archiving the Scholarly Git Experience

An Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funded project that seeks to investigate the scholarly git experience, and inform the way code and annotations on Git hosting platforms can be made stable, permanently citable, and under active preservation following an established and accepted workflow.  Participate in the survey to give them good information about and from the RSE Community!

Hidden REF

Hidden REF is a year-long competition to highlight the research staff that publications overlook. The way in which the (usual) REF exercise is conducted overlooks many of the people who are vital to the success of research. The Hidden REF will celebrate all research outputs and recognise everyone who contributes to their creation. Anyone who works in a UK research institution can submit to the hidden REF. Read more detail here in this Research Professional news article and get involved via their website.

In the news…Covid-19 Efforts

Society Press Release

You have probably seen the various articles and institutes talking about current events and scientific research code recently. This is obviously a subject close to our hearts so Society trustees are preparing a statement about how this relates to our work which will be released next week on the Society website. In the meantime, you can read the response by Neil Chue Hong and Simon Hettrick from the Software Sustainability Institute ‘Critique software, but understand the constraints it’s written under‘, featured in the Research Professional News.

RSEs contributing to the national COVID-19 response through RAMP

Many RSEs are contributing to a major COVID-19 modelling effort under the Royal Society’s RAMP scheme: The Scottish COVID-19 Response Consortium (SCRC). The consortium of around 120 people is developing models to assess different potential medium- and long-term strategies for controlling the COVID-19 epidemic in the UK and in Scotland. Research Software Engineering is a major part of the activity as the goal is to deliver multiple open source models with robust, reproducible, and transparent validation pipelines to link models and their outputs to source data and assumptions. Read more in this news article. 

Recent News:

We’re repeating some of last months news below because it is still very relevant.

UKRI open call ‘Get funding for ideas that address COVID-19’

Proposals are invited for short-term projects addressing and mitigating the health, social, economic, cultural and environmental impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak. 

Researchers holding existing UKRI standard grants should in the first instance consider whether they could repurpose that funding to address the objectives of this call. You can apply to switch your existing funding here. Repurposing your existing grant is the quickest way to start the research.

• Project length: Up to 18 months
• Closing date: none – apply at any time
• Funding: 80% of the full economic cost (fEC) for Research Council funding.
• Award range: There is no specific budget for this call. We are interested in funding research of any scale that can demonstrate it will deliver impact in the project length.

Go to the website for further information

eScience Center awards funding to four research projects focused on COVID-19

The Netherlands eScience Center has awarded funding to four innovative research proposals related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The selected projects will run between 3 and 12 months and receive in-kind research engineering support. With these projects, the eScience Center will use its expertise in research software development to help address the current pandemic. The projects span several domains and focus on monitoring and analysing public sentiment to government measures and announcements, the relation between COVID-19 and heart disease, the development of a tailored model to inform public health interventions for infection diseases in the Netherlands, and the refinement of a platform to enable the development and deployment of machine learning algorithms for the automated scoring of CT scans to detect and assess the severity of COVID-19.

Health Data Research UK

Find out about the ways in which Health Data Research UK, as the national institute for health data science for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, is championing the use of health data to respond to COVID-19. Read on their website how they are supporting SAGE.

RDA COVID-19 Working Group – Urgent Call for Expert Contributions

There’s still time to sign up to this working group and in particular the Software Subgroup.  They have just released their first set of guidelines last week which include overarching recommendations on software best practice for the research community responding to COVID-19. If you are interested in contributing to the development of these guidelines for research software practices over the next month, to assist the global research community in responding to COVID-19, then you can join RDA COVID19-software email list . As an international, consensus-driven, community based organisation, the Research Data Alliance (RDA) has been asked to leverage on the global RDA data community to support the urgent Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic. As a response, RDA has set up a fast track Working Group titled the “RDA COVID-19 Working Group”. Read the full call here.

Covid Symptom Tracker

The COVID symptom tracker was created by doctors and scientists at King’s College London, Guys and St Thomas’ Hospitals working in partnership with ZOE Global Ltd – a health science company.

The app will be used to study the symptoms of COVID-19 and track the spread of this virus. This research is led by Prof. Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London and director of TwinsUK.

“The information you give us is essential to understand COVID-19. We take the trust you’ve granted us very seriously and have rigorous steps in place to ensure your information is secure. This is why public health and other authorities are working with us. We are also working hard to improve the app based on your feedback. This is a non-profit initiative so please bear with us.”

Take Part in a Social Study of Covid-19

The March Network, a UKRI-funded Mental Health research network, has launched a study into the psychological and social experiences of Covid-19 in the UK during this period of the pandemic. The study is open to all adults in the UK. Participation involves answering a 15-minute online survey now and then answering a shorter 10-minute follow-up survey once a week whilst social isolation measures are in place. Please take part, and share to your contacts. The survey can be accessed here.

The results from this are vital if we are to understand the effects of social isolation on individuals and will help to track trajectories of mental health and loneliness in the UK over the coming weeks, identify which groups are most at risk, and understand the effects of any potentially protective activities people could be engaging in.

They will be providing public data releases each week. You can sign up to receive these here.  They are also liaising with key policy and healthcare bodies within the UK, and with teams in other countries to produce cross-national comparisons.

The Academic Data Science Alliance – Invitation to participate

The Academic Data Science Alliance is working with partners to pull together data sets and data science resources related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Initiated by conversations with Columbia, NYU, UC Berkeley, and UWashington, universities in three regions of the U.S. hit hard by the coronavirus, we invite the data science community to contribute to this living list of resources on the ADSA COVID-19 website. Please send additions, corrections, comments, and suggestions to us using this feedback form.Over time, ADSA hopes to provide additional services that can effectively match data science expertise with health and medical science questions and needs.We welcome collaborations on this ADSA COVID-19 initiative. Please feel free to forward this email to colleagues and invite them to join our mailing list by sending requests to [email protected]

Interesting article related to Covid-19 – ‘Ten Considerations before you create another chart about covid-19’

ReSA taskforce to document research software landscape

ReSA’s mission is to bring research software communities together to collaborate on the advancement of research software. Its vision is to have research software recognised and valued as a fundamental and vital component of research worldwide. Given our mission, there are multiple reasons that it’s important for us to understand the landscape of communities that are involved with software, in aspects such as preservation, citation, career paths, productivity, and sustainability. Read more about their taskforce here.

Events

June

The next webinar in IDEAS Productivity’s HPC Best Practices series is SYCL – Introduction and Best Practices on 10 June.

The ISC High Performance conference that takes place annually in Frankfurt, Germany has, this year, had to be cancelled. Instead, ISC High Performance 2020 has been replaced with a cut-down online version of the conference from 22nd-24th June 2020 which will be free to join. Registration opens 2nd June.

2 Days Virtual GPU Bootcamp (June 29th – 30th, 2020) – GPU Bootcamp is an exciting and unique way for scientists and researchers to learn the skills needed to start quickly accelerating codes on GPUs. Held as a virtual event in June, this two-day event will introduce you to available GPU libraries, programming models, and platforms where you will learn the basics of GPU programming through extensive hands-on collaboration based on real-life applications using the OpenACC programming model.  Moreover, you will get hands-on experience on how to use NVIDIA Nsight tools and NVTX to profile your applications. This virtual GPU Bootcamp is organized in collaboration with the Society of Research Software Engineering, OpenACC.org, and NVIDIA. Please register via google form.

Agenda

Day 1: 

• Introduction to GPU Programming with OpenACC (8:45 – 12:30)
• Mini-application challenge (offline, 13:30-18:00)

Day 2: 

• Introduction to Nsight Tools and NVTX API (8:45 – 11:30)

Instructors

Mozhgan Kabiri chimeh (NVIDIA) – Dr Mozhgan Kabiri Chimeh is a GPU developer advocate at NVIDIA helping to bring GPU and HPC to a growing user community in Europe and around the world. She is a community builder with a passion for open source software and is actively involved in the HPC and RSE communities. As a Software Sustainability Institute fellow, and Research Software Engineer (RSE) advocate, she is actively promoting reproducible and sustainable software, use of HPC and particularly GPUs through training, seminars, research software consultancy and outreach.

Bharatkumar Sharma (NVIDIA) – Bharatkumar has around 10 years of development and research experience in the domain of Software Architecture, Distributed and Parallel Computing. He has recently published a book on CUDA 10. He is currently working with Nvidia as a GPU Advocate.  He has expertise in designing Software for Non Functional Requirements and Software Migration to latest heterogeneous parallel architectures. Bharat has received his master degree in Information Technology from Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT, Bangalore).

Mandar Gurav (NVIDIA) – Mandar is an HPC developer who enjoys helping people accelerate their scientific applications on CPU and GPU platforms. He is currently working with Nvidia as GPU Advocate Associate and is responsible for delivering bootcamps, creating bootcamp materials, mentoring at hackathons and overall support onboarding users on GPUs. His areas of interest include parallelization of scientific codes, heterogeneous computing, performance analysis of programs and optimization, numerical methods. 

July

The International Fortran Conference 2020 takes place from 2nd-4th July 2020 in Zurich, Switzerland, or remotely, depending on the COVID-19 situation.

Europython2020 will be online on the 23rd-26th July. Ticket sales are open.

JuliaCon 2020, is planned to take place in Lisbon, Portugal on the 27th-31st July 2020.

2020 GPU Hackathon

Following the success of our 2019 event, the University of Sheffield and NVIDIA are pleased to announce that we will be hosting a 2020 GPU Hackathon as part of the NVIDIA international GPU Hackathon Series. This event will take place July 27th – 31st, 2020 most likely as an online event unless government restrictions around COVID-19 are significantly altered. Prior GPU experience is not required, as those selected will be paired with experienced mentors who will teach them how to leverage accelerated computing in their own applications or further optimize their codes.

General-purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) potentially offer exceptionally high memory bandwidth and performance for a wide range of applications. A challenge in utilizing such accelerators has been learning how to program them. The hackathon is intended to help overcome this challenge for new GPU programmers and also to help existing GPU programmers to further optimize their applications – a great opportunity for graduate students and postdocs. Any and all GPU programming paradigms are welcome.

There will be intensive mentoring during this 5-day hands-on workshop, with the goal that the teams leave with applications running on GPUs, or at least with a clear roadmap of how to get there. Each team will be assigned mentors from universities, national laboratories, supercomputing centers, industry partners, and NVIDIA who have extensive experience in programming GPUs.

Given the current COVID-19 situation and the current ambition to accelerate infectious disease and infrastructure modelling it would be great to attract applications from teams who are keen to work with GPU experts to improve performance and scalability of models in this area.

The call for hacking projects is officially open. Early applications are welcome. The project leader should submit through the Hackathon Program Website.  If you are interested in being a mentor then please contact Paul Richmond.  More details on the event are on the official website.

September

The annual HPC Autumn Academy

The HPC Autumn Academy, hosted by the Centre for Scientific Computing at the University of Cambridge, will be online this year, from 7th-18th September 2020. Lectures will given on C++, Fortran, Performance Programming, OpenMP, MPI, and various other topics suitable for Master’s/Ph.D. students, early-career researchers, and early-career industrial software developers who need High-Performance Computing skills as part of their course or work. Full details here.

The eLife Innovation Sprint 2020 takes place on 2nd/3rd September in Cambridge, UK. They’ve announced the 15 projects that have been chosen for the sprint. Registration is open until the 7th June.

Past Events Resources

PyCon US 2020 went online this year and you can watch all the recorded talks and tutorials here.

The N8CIR are releasing the videos from their events held in 2019. Keep an eye on this link as they release them. Currently, you can see James Hetherington and Mike Croucher speaking along with talks about working with the cloud.

Podcasts

RSE Stories for May – Andy Turner from the EPCC and Todd Gamblin from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Welcome to RSE Stories! Here Vanessa Sochat, an RSE for Stanford Research Computing, shares stories from research software engineers to better understand the many phenotypes and facets that can define an RSE. In May, Vanessa interviewed Andy Turner from the EPCC and Todd Gamblin, a computer scientist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

As initiatives to empower RSEs take off around the world, whether you are a scientist, a programmer, or something else, your story is interesting and unique, and we want to hear about it!  Sign up here for an interview. It’s important that we can share our stories, because we’re all a little different. Interviewing comes down to joining a call on Zoom – it’s easy, low key – the interviewee don’t have to prepare anything, or really worry about “messing up” because Vanessa edits out the umms and what not. Everyone gets to preview their episode after she’s done editing, and nothing is released that the interviewee doesn’t completely like.

Blogs

• Alex Remedios, co-Founder of Treebeard Technologies brings us his latest blog post: Devops for Data Science: Making your Python Project Reproducible
• Return of the King – This is part three of a three part post detailing Christopher Woods’ (Bristol) RSE work on the MetaWards project. In part one I talked about trust in software and data, and why my first step was to port the original code from C to Python. In part two I introduced the two challenges of research software – robustness and speed, and how I overcame these by walking back to C.  In this part three I will cover a lot of topics, as the last six weeks have been very eventful.
• The Software Sustainability Institute Blog is a great place to find some interesting stuff. Most recently the blog posts from the Collaborations Workshop 2020 were posted with titles ‘Best practices for building an institutionally based community’, Carrot and stick approaches to promoting research software as a community’, ‘Bootstrapping a development team during the time of crisis’, ‘Maintaining your legacy – tips for making legacy code sustainable’, ‘How to engage Research Group Leaders in sustainable software  practices’ and many more!

Community info

Lesson on Security and Safe Use of SSH Keys – James Grant (Bath) has been developing a security lesson that can be accessed at the link above. Thanks to Will Furnass, Jack Betteridge, Will Saunders and James Davenport in particular.

Snakemake supports Google Life Sciences API – The Python workflow manager Snakemake 5.18 is released and now supports the Google Life Sciences API, meaning you can submit your workflows to use Google Cloud resources. This work was funded and supported by Google and conducted by the awesome Vanessa Sochat (@vsoch) from StanfordCompute.

Archer2 Upcoming Training Schedule

Imperial College Newsletter – The Imperial College RSE Team have been producing a newsletter for a while now to their institute community. They include a ‘Research Software of the month’, links to blog posts and dates for your diary.

Open Access to ACM Digital Library During Coronavirus Pandemic – For the next three months, there will be no fees assessed for accessing or downloading work published by ACM.

Free Springer books – the book publisher has just released over 400 book titles that can be downloaded for free. There are many titles on programming, computer science for example ‘Advanced Guide to Python 3 Programming’, ‘Probability and Statistics for Computer Science’, ‘Java in two semesters’.

MaDiH: Research Software Engineering Training’– this was a training course on Research Software Engineering in Digital Humanities modelled on King’s Digital Lab approach.

Efficient R Programming: A book Exciting news for anyone looking to speed up their data analysis code.

An ultimate list of useful git commands.

Papers – Quick links

• A graduate student perspective on overcoming barriers to interacting with open-source software by Oihane Cereceda and Danielle E.A. Quinn

• Enhanced Access to Publicly Funded Data for Science, Technology and Innovation from the OECD

• New paper throws light on state of exascale computing from the eScience center in the Netherlands.

• A short video about their paper “Lessons learned in a decade of research software engineering GPU applications” by Ben van Werkhoven, Willem Jan Palenstijn, Alessio Sclocco from the Netherlands eScience Center.

RSE Worldwide

The RSE campaign is growing around the worldwide and new groups are being created all the time. In this section, we introduce these groups and raise awareness of their success. The Society supports new groups and collaborates with representatives from these groups on various initiatives (papers, international workshops). (In alphabetial order).

AU/NZ RSE Group

Back in October 2019, the AU/NZ RSE Group held their first mini-conference for Australasia in Brisbane. Read about that here.

CANARIE

CANARIE have launched a call to fund software development teams at Canadian Higher-education Institutions to directly support researchers. Following the success of a pilot and similar efforts deployed in European countries, CANARIE’s Local Research Software Support call will fund teams of three dedicated, full-time research software developers at a target of six participating institutions. Further info here.

de RSE

As mentioned above, due to the current SARS-CoV-2 virus/COVID-19 pandemic, the deRSE20 organisers have decided to cancel deRSE20 – 2nd International Conference for Research Software Engineers in Germany, planned to take place from 25-27 August in Jena, Germany. “We have made this decision with a heavy heart, but – given the current situation – did not see any other way to eliminate any risks for attendees and organizers.” See the full announcement here.

NL RSE

The Netherlands RSE Group (NL RSE) had their first conference in November 2019. From that conference, here is the presentation ‘Five Recommendations for Fair Software‘ and a recap on the ‘Fair Software‘ Session

The NL-RSE meets on regular basis, every two months on average. Netherlands eScience Center, DTL and SURF frequently organise NL-RSE meetups to encourage collaboration and communication between Research Software Engineers in the Netherlands.

Nordic RSE

The Nordic RSE Group plans to hold their first Nordic-RSE conference in the week December 1-2, 2020.

US RSE

Don’t miss this – the US RSE group have released a summary ‘A year of Progress for US-RSE‘ and it’s a great read! Read about the US RSE group in their newsletter here.

Github repo of the month!

Nominate significant code for this feature – either yours or somebody else’s you read and found useful or cool. Send it to Claire Wyatt, RSE Community Manager.

Funding Opportunities

If you know of any funding opportunities that would be of interest to the community, please send them to Claire Wyatt, RSE Community Manager for the next newsletter.

Webinars

Again, if you know of any webinars past or future that would be of interest to the community, please send them to Claire for the next newsletter.

 Collect your gold star here if you’ve read all the way to the end!