Welcome to the May newsletter from The Society of Research Software Engineering! Our bi-monthly newsletter announces new Society initiatives, gathers RSE news, events, blogs, papers and anything else 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 this short form or get in touch with Claire Wyatt, RSE Community Manager.

Newsletter Contents:
>Society Update
>Announcements
>RSE Case Studies and Profiles
>Events
>Podcasts
>Blog posts
>Community info
>RSE Worldwide

Society Updates

Membership

We are at 556 paid-up members. Not yet a member? Why not join us?

May Trustees’ Meeting

This month your Board of trustees had its first in-person meeting for a couple of years. Thanks go to The University of Manchester for hosting, in particular Prof Carole Goble, Shoaib Ahmed Sufi and Rob Haines. Rob, as Head of Research IT – and currently their RSE team – kindly joined us at lunch time for a Q&A session on, amongst other things, how the local team is structured and operates.

RSE Leaders Network

Reminder: there is an RSE Leaders Network open to any leader or aspiring leader in the RSE Community. Confidential discussions on the slack channel and at the regular meetings on topics such as recruitment, managing a team, grant writing, managing up and many more. There are two meetings coming up for this network: July in Birmingham, hosted by Ed (Andrew) Edmondson and then in September at RSECon2022 on Monday 5th September hosted by Mark Turner.  Email Claire to join the slack channel and the mailing list ([email protected]).

Announcements 

RSECon2022

We’ve had a record number of submissions for the September conference in Newcastle this year. Abstract reviewing should be complete, or will be very soon. All details of the conference.

Staying with our conference theme…Nominations for Community Awards Open. Please nominate one or more of your colleagues for one of these community awards.

RSE-ESCIENCE-2022 Call for full papers

The deadline for the RSE-ESCIENCE-2022 call for full papers has been EXTENDED to TUESDAY, MAY 31.  The call for papers and/or abstracts is open NOW. 

US-RSE is organizing a workshop as part of the IEEE eScience 2022 conference (to take place IN PERSON in Salt Lake City): RSEs in eScience. This workshop will present RSE contributions to scientific research through a series of talks that explore scientific project needs, how access to RSEs made the project successful, and how this work can be applied to future scientific research efforts. The workshop will be of interest to existing RSEs, potential RSEs, domain scientists, and software developers who want to understand the lessons from both good and bad research software engineering experiences.

Important Dates

• Submissions open: Monday, April 11, 2022
• Paper submissions due (to be included with official proceedings): EXTENDED to TUESDAY, MAY 31.
• Notifications sent: Monday, June 27, 2022
• Abstract submissions due (will NOT be included with official proceedings): Monday, July 11, 2022
• Notifications sent: Monday, July 25, 2022
• Program finalized: Monday, August 15, 2022

Please feel free to contact [email protected] with any questions.

Case Studies

All the case studies to-date can be found at https://society-rse.org/careers/case-studies/.

We’re looking for more case studies! We want to show all the shapes and forms that RSEs come in, and all the brilliant work they do and are looking for RSEs willing to work with us to put together case studies. We will send you a set of questions to answer (either career-focused or EDI focused, your choice), and are very happy to have a chat if you are unsure about something or need help writing up your answers. Email [email protected] if you are interested or have any questions.

Events

June

Are you at one of the N8 group of universities? The N8 CIR Community Day is re-scheduled (13 June 2022) and open for registration.

The next DiveRSE talk is June 13/14th 2022 see the event in your time zone.

Dr Kelly Blincoe, Senior Lecturer in Software Engineering at the  University of Auckland, NZ will describe a study examining software code review feedback. The talk will take place via Zoom.

For more information see the events page of the DiveRSE website and share it with your communities.

FREE Tickets are now available for the inaugural meeting of RSE Midlands. Date: 8th June 2022. Venue: Edgbaston Park Hotel, University of Birmingham. See https://rse-midlands.github.io for more information. The Society is proud to sponsor the RSE Midlands event from the Society ‘Events and Initiatives’ Grant. You can apply to the grant for all sorts of events – training, regional networking, whatever you think would be useful to the RSE community!

Task Parallelism Workshop at ICCS

When? June 21, 2022

Registration: (registration tab at the bottom of the page)

Future supercomputing architectures are expected to exhibit unprecedented hardware parallelism. This parallelism has to be “harvested” on the software side. Traditional, global, loop-based parallelism and notably the bulk-synchronous/BSP paradigm are insufficient, and developers might have to go back to the drawing board and uncover alternatives to equip their code with higher concurrency. Task-based parallelism is one tool to write such new, highly concurrent software. It phrases programs as sequence of steps including their causal dependencies, but leaves the decision what (aka which task), when and where to execute a task to a task runtime.

The crosscutting ExCALIBUR project on Exposing Parallelism – Task Parallelism aims to develop a data-driven taskification toolset and workflow, to investigate task features that are missing within mainstream tasking approaches, and to establish taskification training and an experience exchange landscape.

This workshop aims to bring researchers, research software engineers and vendors together to discuss the current state of the art, issues, experiences and ideas for tasking in research software.

July

Reminder: there is an RSE Leaders Network open to any leader or aspiring leader in the RSE Community. Confidential discussions on the slack channel and at the regular meetings on topics such as recruitment, managing a team, grant writing, managing up and many more. There are two meetings coming up for this network: July in Birmingham, hosted by Ed (Andrew) Edmondson and then in September at RSECon2022 on Monday 5th September hosted by Mark Turner.  Email Claire to join the slack channel and the mailing list ([email protected]).

Please join Supercomputing Wales in Cardiff on 5 July 2022 for “The Power and Future of Supercomputing in Wales”, a showcase and celebration of the impact of our high-performance computing (HPC) and research software engineering.

From modelling the spread of COVID-19 to mapping and monitoring land cover across Wales using satellite imagery, Supercomputing Wales has been at the heart of advanced research and innovation in Wales since 2016. Indeed, with large-scale data now abundant, and needing to be processed, analysed and understood, HPC and software engineering hold a critical enabling function in the research and innovation landscape in Wales, the UK and beyond. 

Guest speakers are Welsh Government Minister for Economy, Vaughan Gething MS, and Professor Mark Wilkinson, Director of DiRAC HPC Facility. Attendees are anticipated to include government departments, researchers funders, RSEs and researchers whose works benefits from HPC and research software engineering. 

We will hear from several of the Supercomputing Wales RSEs on the outcomes and impact of their work. Details of the full programme will be provided to attendees in June.

The day is free to attend. Please register your attendance at the conference’s Eventbrite page, and please forward this e-mail to other colleagues that may be interested in the event. We encourage you to join us in Cardiff but the event will be live streamed online to allow for wider participation.

Supercomputing Wales is a consortium of universities – Cardiff, Swansea, Bangor and Aberystwyth – working together to offer high-performance computing and research software engineering services to enable excellent science and innovation in Wales. It is part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund through the Welsh Government.

September

RSECon2022 – The conference will take place from Tuesday 6th to Thursday 8th September in Newcastle. Please visit the website to find out more. If you would like to hear updates on the conference, please fill in this form to be added to the mailing list. 

Registration is now open for the HPC and RSE Workshop – ExCALIBUR RSEs meet HPC Champions on September 9th in Newcastle co-located with RSECon22. This event will be run in a hybrid fashion so you can attend in-person or online.

The Second US-RSE Virtual Workshop is open for submissions! The workshop will be in September and submissions are due to July 15th. If you are interested in being a reviewer you can also apply by July 15th.

Podcasts

New episode on #CodeforThought: Meet Sarah Gibson from https://2i2c.org who’s telling us all about JupyterHubs and what it takes to run them.

#RSEStories listeners – the first mini series on the RSE Stories podcast – the amazing Miranda Mundt from Sandia National Labs interviews Jay Lofstead from Sandia National Laboratories to talk about the inclusivity committee at SC22!

Blog Posts

How Manchester’s RSEs do automatic testing in the Cloud for their mobile app developments, by Patricia Barnby.

RSE Worldwide

Awareness of the RSE role and the RSE community is growing around the world with new national groups 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 them on various initiatives (papers, international workshops).

In January 2021, the International Council of RSE Associations was founded as a forum to communicate and formally meet to ensure cohesion between associations and to provide a platform for open discussion around international issues and affairs.

(In alphabetical order)

RSSE Africa New!

AU/NZ RSE Group

Belgium Research Software Engineers Community

Join the (informal) chats of the Belgium Research Software Engineers community on https://gitter.im/be-rse/. 

Digital Research Alliance of Canada / Alliance de recherche numerique du Canada

Responsibility for Research Software in Canada is transitioning from CANARIE to The Alliance.

de-RSE

Dates for the joined monthly calls of the Open Science und Research Software Engineering communities can be found here.

NL RSE

New meet-ups are scheduled for NL RSE. Interested in proposing a workshop, talk, or some other contribution? Get in touch!

Nordic RSE

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, they 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 they analyze and discuss on stream. They broadcast on Twitch Thursdays at 20:30 Oslo time / 21:30 Helsinki time.

US RSE

Upcoming and recurring events can be found on the events website!