November Newsletter

Society Updates

Welcome to the November newsletter from The Society of Research Software Engineering! Our bi-monthly (sometime 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.

Membership

We currently have 686 paid-up members of the Society. Not yet a member? Why not join us today? Should you become member 700, you will win a prize (e.g. a conference tee-shirt)! Read about all the benefits of being a member on our website. We welcome people to become members who are not employed as RSEs but do support our mission. We are looking for a sentence, or one paragraph, contributions from such people to highlight the fact that we are about research software engineering and not just research software engineers. Several professors are active members of the Society, for example. Contact us at [email protected].

We are now on HMRC’s approved list, so you can claim Income Tax relief as an employment expense if you pay for your membership yourself. We come up under Society of Research Software Engineering.

RSECon24

Please join us at #RSECon24 in Newcastle from 02-06 September 2024. We were there for #RSECon22 and had a wonderful time, and we’re really looking forward to being back in 2024. Put the dates in your diaries now!

deRSE24

The 4th conference for Research Software Engineering in Germany, will be hosted at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg from the 5th to the 7th March 2024. The call for contributions is now open and we encourage you to submit early. Submission is through indico and is a very simple process. Please don’t hesitate to contact the organising team if you have any questions.

New Durham workshop series: Debugging, Testing and Correctness: https://scicomp.webspace.durham.ac.uk/teaching/professional-development/debugging-testing-and-correctness-workshop-series-2023/

The “Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing (PASC24)” conference (https://pasc24.pasc-conference.org/), to be held in Zurich in June 2024. The theme of PASC24 is “Synthesizing Applications Through Learning and Computing”. The PASC Conference series is an international and interdisciplinary platform for the exchange of knowledge in scientific computing and computational science with a strong focus on methods, tools, algorithms, application challenges, and novel techniques and usage of high-performance computing. Contributions from various and diverse venues of scientific computing and its applications are very welcome! Some important dates: 21 October 2023 for expression of interest for a minisymposium proposal (https://pasc24.pasc-conference.org/submission/guidelines-for-minisymposia/); 1 December 2023 for submission of papers (https://pasc24.pasc-conference.org/submission/guidelines-for-papers/); 22 December 2023 for submission of posters (https://pasc24.pasc-conference.org/submission/guidelines-for-posters/). For any questions regarding the submission or reviewing process please email [email protected]

Announcements

HPC-RSE BoF

After our HPC-RSE BoF at RSECon23. Andy, Ed & Marion promised to write a blog post about it, and it has taken us until now to keep that promise. But here it is:

https://society-rse.org/hpc-birds-of-a-feather-rsecon-2023/

International Research Software Engineering Research Community Meetup

16–17 January 2024: https://www.software.ac.uk/news/international-research-software-engineering-research-irser-community-meetup

RESA

RESA had a meeting this month on Research Community Leaders Forum (CLF):

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CRYoycC-uwmRfC10nlLTHMfuwDai-RwEqjWQedfrG3U/edit

FAIRSECO: An Extensible Framework for Impact Measurement of Research Software

Deekshitha, S. Farshidi, J. Maassen, R. Bakhshi, R. Van Nieuwpoort and S. Jansen, “FAIRSECO: An Extensible Framework for Impact Measurement of Research Software,” 2023 IEEE 19th International Conference on e-Science (e-Science), Limassol, Cyprus, 2023, pp. 1-10, doi: 10.1109/e-Science58273.2023.10254664.

DiverRSE

Jeremy Cohen has prepared a blog post from Rowland Mosbergen talk – we are grateful to Rowland for the input and feedback on this, which was sponsored by the Society. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Zr8T1IYH9H7kXVp4Y2T6aySa0cD7bvqjlEHyuStwXmU/edit?usp=sharing

Mastodon

For a long while, Twitter ruled supreme in the world of micro-blogging. But no more. Since summer 2022, a number of users have moved away from the blue bird. One of those platforms people flocked towards is the federated world of Mastodonia. This month, we finally created our account on the mastodon.social server and you can find (and one hopes follow) us under @[email protected] . Happy Tooting!

Digital Collections

Are you a Research Software Engineer working with Digital Collections in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, or Museums? Join our user study workshop to collaboratively shape the future of digital collections infrastructure. Your insights will enhance research capabilities and access to cultural heritage resources. Hosted by David Beavan and Claire Bailey-Ross.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/user-consultation-workshop-on-digital-collections-tickets-763296078117

EESSI

Have you ever wished that all the scientific software you use was available on all the resources you had access to, without having to go through the pain of getting them installed the way you want/need?

The European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI, pronounced “easy”) is a common stack of scientific software installations for HPC systems and beyond, including laptops, personal workstations and cloud infrastructure. In many ways it works like a streaming service for scientific software, instantly giving you the software you need, when you need it, and compiled to work efficiently for the architecture you have access to.

On Tuesday 5 December 2023 (14:30-16:00 CET) there will be an online presentation on EESSI (https://eessi.io) entitled “Streaming Optimised Scientific Software: an Introduction to EESSI”, which is being organised in the context of the MultiXscale EuroHPC Centre-of-Excellence (https://www.multixscale.eu), but open to anyone who’s interested.

In this talk, we’ll explain what EESSI is, how it is being designed, how to get access to it, and how to use it.

We’ll give a number of demonstrations and also give access to a resource where you can try EESSI out for yourself.

If you would like to attend this session, please register via: https://event.ugent.be/registration/eurohpcncceessi202312(note: this is a different event from the “Best Practices for CernVM-FS in HPC” tutorial on Mon 4 Dec’23, see https://event.ugent.be/registration/cvmfshpc202312)

FIRE and HWAcc event: optimizing applications on heterogeneous CPU-accelerator systems

SURF, together with the HW Acceleration Community, is organising a new FIRE GPU and FPGA seminar.

You are most welcome!

This is the third of a series of seminars bringing together GPU and FPGA practitioners, computer science and engineering experts, scientific computing experts, application owners and HPC providers.

The series is part of the FIRE symposia and is jointly organised by SURF and the Hardware Accelleration Network NL. The focus of this event is on optimizing applications on heterogeneous CPU-accelerator systems, using a software-hardware co-design approach to achieve full system optimization. We invite speakers from industry and academia to share their thoughts and experiences in using GPU and FPGA accelerated systems for a number of relevant applications domains.

You can sign up at the Google Form here. More information at: https://www.surf.nl/en/agenda/fire-fpga-innovation-research-exchange

Location: The event will take place at the SURF office in Utrecht, Moreelsepark 48, 3511 EP Utrecht.

Registration is now open for a series of free to attend scientific computing courses for Environmental Scientists.

(The below is UK-centric; apologies to overseas readers)

Following on from courses we ran last year, EPCC at the University of Edinburgh, along with the National Oceanography Centre and the University of Oxford, has had its NERC Training Grant extended!

We will be running courses that cover skills and tools that train researchers and scientists in a range of core data skills for efficient, shareable, and reproducible research practices, via three sets of courses:

An introductory course (for which no prior knowledge is required). This will cover simple use of the command line, an introduction to using python, and understanding version control.
An intermediate course, covering data analysis and good programming practices, which will assume knowledge equivalent to attendance at the introductory course
An advanced course, covering more specialist computational skills, such as how to run python in a distributed computing environment to help analyse large data sets

The introductory course will be run as four repeated courses:

Wednesday 6th – Friday 8th December 2023 in Oxford (15th November) *
Thursday 18th & Friday 19th January 2024 online, via Zoom (10th January)
Wednesday 17th & Thursday 18th April 2024 in Edinburgh (27th March)
Monday 17th & Tuesday 18th June 2024, in Liverpool (22nd May)

The intermediate course will be run as three repeated courses:

Tuesday 20th – Thursday 22nd February 2024 in Edinburgh (31st January) *
Wednesday 13th & Thursday 14th March 2024 in Oxford (14th February)
Monday 13th & Tuesday 14th May 2024 online, via Zoom (1st May)

The advanced course will be run as two repeated courses:

Tuesday 9th – Thursday 11th April 2024 in Liverpool (13th April) *
Thursday 30th & Friday 31st May 2024 online, via Zoom (15th May)

Courses marked with an asterisk (*) are 3 days in length: the third day is a non-teaching day but is available for attendees to help consolidate the knowledge they’ve gained from the previous two days. Attendees are encouraged to do this by bringing along their own data or code. Following feedback from previous course, we hope this will be a valuable opportunity for attendees to become more confident with tackling coding problems; all of the teaching staff and helpers involved in the delivery of the course will be available to give help on these days. Although optional, we would strongly encourage all attendees of these courses to attend the third day.

Each day will run from 0930 to 1700, with refreshments and lunch being provided. Courses are open to any scientist working within the NERC domain in any academic, public, or third sector organisation, they will be free to attend, and with additional funding being available:

UK travel and 1 night’s accommodation, for the in-person courses, with priority given to registered PhD students. For the 3-day courses, we can additionally fund a 2nd night’s accommodation.
reasonable caring costs for attendees who have dependents, which means they would normally struggle to attend a course (either in-person or online).

All courses have a maximum capacity of 30 attendees.

Registration for all courses is now open at the following link: https://forms.office.com/e/XmwiCpMK38 – if you wish to apply for more than one instance of our courses, please complete the form for each course you wish to attend. Please do forward to others who may be interested in these courses. Questions about the courses can be sent to Chris Wood: [email protected]

Jülich #Open Science Speaker Series

Speaker: Dr. Esther Plomp; Topic: Ten simple rules for starting FAIR discussions in your community; Date: 5 Dec 2023, 2pm CET

Zoom Registration: http://go.fzj.de/josss-zoom. In-person Registration: https://go.fzj.de/josss-in-person

Abstract: This lecture is a summary of the ‘Ten simple rules for starting FAIR discussions in your community’ article that provides guidance on how to start up discussions around the implementation of the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and how to standardise research workflows to facilitate interoperability. This work will be particularly relevant if you are unsure where to start, who to involve, what the benefits and barriers of standardisation are, and little work has been done in your discipline to standardise research workflows. These ten rules aim to support you to more effectively engaging your community with discussions on standardisation and practical implementation of the FAIR principles.

About: Esther Plomp (she/her) is the Data Steward of the Faculty of Applied Sciences at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands (since 2018). She is also a member of many Open Science communities such as the Turing Wayand Open Life Science. She is on the board of the isotope archaeology data repository IsoArcH.

2nd International Workshop on FAIR Containerized Computational Software

https://www.nist.gov/news-events/events/2023/12/2nd-international-workshop-fair-containerized-computational-software

CERN-VM-FS

On Monday 4 December 2023 (13:30-17:00 CET) we are organising a half-day online introductory tutorial on CernVM-FS, via Zoom, in collaboration with the CernVM-FS development team.

CernVM-FS, the CernVM File System (also known as CVMFS), is a file distribution service that is particularly well suited to distribute software installations across a large number of systems world-wide in an efficient way.

The focus of this tutorial is on explaining what CernVM-FS is, how to access existing CernVM-FS repositories (like EESSI), and covering some aspects specific to using CernVM-FS on HPC systems.

It is intended for people with a background in HPC (system administrators, support team members, end users, etc.) who are new to CernVM-FS: no specific prior knowledge or experience with it is required.

If you would like to attend this tutorial, please register via https://event.ugent.be/registration/cvmfshpc202312

Please help us promote this event, by sharing it with colleagues and friends, and/or posting this event announcement on appropriate channels.

The call for participation for the HPC, Big Data, and Data Science devroom at FOSDEM’24 (probably the biggest open source software event in Europe, Sat+Sun 3+4 Feb 2024 in Brussels, Belgium) is now open: https://hpc-bigdata-fosdem24.github.io

Please consider submitting a talk proposal (deadline is Fri 1 Dec 2023, submissions are very light-weight, basically only talk title + description).

SocRSE Trustees

The new Board of Trustees was elected at the AGM held during RSECon23. See our Governance page for full details with a list of the current trustees https://society-rse.org/about/governance/.

Let the Society support your RSE event!

Do you have an idea for an event about research software and supports the Society’s mission statement? The Society is here to help, why not submit a request to our Events and Initiatives Fund to help get your event going. You can submit a request via our Google form or contact us for a more informal discussion via [email protected].

Get involved with the Comms and Publicity Working Group
The Society has agreed the formation of a working group for Communications and Publicity. This working group is open to all Society members who want to get more involved in helping shape the work of the Society around the way we do Communications and Publicity. If you want to get involved with drafting the newsletter, expanding our social media output or shaping other communication based topics let us know via [email protected]. Former trustee Ian Cottam is now such a volunteer with this group.

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

The next US RSE conference in October 2024 will be in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. The association is looking for volunteers and co-organisers. If you are in the USA and interested, get in touch with them.

Upcoming Events

Check out, and contribute to, the SocRSE Events’ Calendar https://sparrow0hawk.github.io/rse-calendar/.

Cambridge RSE runs a weekly seminar on Thursdays. Whilst local RSEs meet in person, talks are also shared on zoom. The current list of talks can be found here: https://talks.cam.ac.uk/show/index/69831 with more details on Slack channel #cambridge.

deRSE24, the 4th conference for Research Software Engineering in Germany, will be hosted at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg from the 5th to the 7th March 2024. The call for contributions is now open and we encourage you to submit early. Submission is through indico and is a very simple process.

Please don’t hesitate to contact the organising team if you have any questions.

New Durham workshop series: Debugging, Testing and Correctness: https://scicomp.webspace.durham.ac.uk/teaching/professional-development/debugging-testing-and-correctness-workshop-series-2023/

Podcasts

November kicked off with an episode of Code for Thought from the first ever RSE conference in the US – in Chicago. And we also started a new season of the ByteSized RSE program – a series of 8 short online tutorials and accompanying podcast episodes on various RSE themes. The subject of the first episode was software estimation – or how long is a piece of string?

In the following episodes we went to France and chatted with engineers from ITER about their work on nuclear fusion and then back to Paris to catch a glimpse of the Jean-Zay supercomputer and the BLOOM large language model that was created there.

Code for Thought is on all major podcast directories and on YouTube (audio only) Code 4 Thought – YouTube

2:00 PM Byte-sized RSE – Series 2, Session 2: Python web application development with Django

Tuesday 5th December 2023, 13:00-14:30 GMT (UTC +/- 0). Hi everyone, the next Byte-sized RSE session will take place on Tuesday 5th December, 13:00-14:30 GMT/UTC and will look at Python web application development with Django.

The session will begin with some general background on web framework and application structures and then look at where Django fits in and its architecture.

After looking at the structure of Django and the different parts of a Django application, we’ll move on to the interactive part of the session where you’ll have a chance to build a simple Django web application from scratch!

Please register to join this session.

SSI announce…
#CollabW24 will be held from Tue 30 Apr to Thu 2 May 2024 at Scarman, Warwick Conferences on the @uniofwarwick campus and will focus on Environmental Sustainability, AI/ML tools for science, and Citizen science.

Blog Posts and Articles

Article by Dan Katz et al., on what it takes to be an RSE in various institutional contexts:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.11457

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

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

The Nordic RSE Group https://nordic-rse.org/ held their online Unconference on 25 – 26 October 2023 https://nordic-rse.org/events/2023-online-unconference/ . It is the third event organised by Nordic RSE. As before, the event was a good mix of workshops and presentations. If interested, follow the link to see more details.

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.