December 2021 Newsletter

14 December 2021 16:00

University of Sheffield Research Software Engineering Team Newsletter December 2021

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the monthly newsletter from the Research Software Engineering Team at The University of Sheffield.

LunchBytes

We have lunchbytes sessions scheduled for January and February, save the date!

  • Parallelisation: an easy trick to speed up your code?, 13th January 2022 12:00-13:00 (rescheduled from December) Parallelisation - running multiple pieces of work at the same time - can be a great way to speed up research code, but requires an appreciation of the costs introduced by distributing work concurrently over computational assets. This session will be made up of short talks introducing both fundamental concepts needed for successful use of parallelisation, and state of the art technologies available for researchers.

    More details about the event are available on our website.

  • High Performance Computing (HPC) at Sheffield and Beyond, 17th February 2022 12:00-13:00 If you find yourself running simulations that take days, struggling to fit datasets in your computer’s memory, training deep learning models or wish you had more computational resource for doing research, HPC might be the solution!

    More details about the event are available on our website.

News

  • Funders need to credit open science - The Dutch Research Council (NWO) makes a push towards more open science by launching the Open Science Fund initiative. Encouraging open access publications, accessible data, and the use of open-source tools and software.

  • The 2021 RSE survey is now open - Please help complete the survey so that we can get a better picture of the state of RSEs around the world.

  • Archer 2 full system open to users - After delays due to covid restrictions, the national-scale cluster was open to users on the 22nd of November. The article provides an introduction to the hardware and software of the system.

  • OLS-5 Cohort is open for applications : The Open Life Science (OLS) program helps individuals and stakeholders in research to become Open Science ambassadors. The program offers 16-week long personal mentorship and cohort-based training. The call for applications closes January 15, 2022.

Events

Web and Blogs

  • Applications of paraview - ParaView is free software that can visualise both observational and numerical data. Through this blog article, Suzana Silva provides us with practical examples of how ParaView can be applied to generate beautiful visualisation for various scientific domains.

  • FortranCon 2021 - Keynote and sessions from FortranCon are now available to watch through this youtube playlist.

Training

  • CodeRefinery twitch channel - CodeRefinery offers training opportunities to researchers from Nordic research groups and projects to learn basic-to-advanced research computing skills and become confident in using state-of-the-art tools and practices from modern collaborative software engineering.

  • Git & GitHub through GitKraken - from Zero to Hero! - Four more sessions of our popular version control course have been confirmed for next year. Visit the links below for more information and to register.

RSE Sheffield

The RSE Sheffield team aims to collaborate with you to help improve your research software. We can provide dedicated staff to ensure that you can deliver excellent research software engineering on your research projects.

The RSE Sheffield team provides free Code Clinics (in collaboration with IT Services), plus paid services that allow us to collaborate longer term.

Contact Us

For queries relating to collaborating with the RSE team on projects: rse@sheffield.ac.uk

Information and access to JADE II and Bede.

Join our mailing list so as to be notified when we advertise talks and workshops by subscribing to this Google Group.

Queries regarding free research computing support/guidance should be raised via our Code clinic or directed to the University IT helpdesk.