September 2022 Newsletter

The University of Sheffield Research Software Engineering Community Newsletter September 2022

Welcome to this month’s newsletter for the research software community at The University of Sheffield, featuring news, opportunities, events and training for you.

News, Web & Blogs

• White Rose Open Educational Resources (OER) Toolkit
• GitHub - SSH commit verification now supported
• Research IT Manchester - Meet Our Year in Industry Students!
• rstudio::conf(2022) talks are available on-demand.
• Python Package Index - targetted phishing campaign
• PLOS partners with DataSeer to develop Open Science Indicators
• 2022 RSE Survey initial analysis is complete and online. Results, GitHub
• Python Packaging User Survey. The objective of this survey is to help the Python Software Foundation (PSF), Packaging Working Group and Python Packaging Authority (PyPA) better understand the challenges and opportunities within the Python packaging ecosystem. Closes 2022-09-30.
• The Sheffield RSE webpages on Researcher Programming Resources have been updated to include a number of new additional resources.

Events

• NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (#GTC22) - Join NVIDIA #GTC22 online (2022-09-19 to 2022-09-22) to discover the innovations that will impact your life’s work. Explore over 200 sessions from some of the brightest minds solving the world’s greatest challenges. Register for free now.
• Hacktoberfest 2022 - Hacktoberfest is DigitalOcean’s annual event that encourages people to contribute to open source throughout October. New for 2022 Low or Non-Code contributions are being encouraged! Registration begins 2022-09-26.
• N8 CIR Ally Skills Training by Open Life Science - 2022-10-07 (Online). In this interactive workshop, you will learn about your own privileges and how to use them to step up for others.
• Investing in Code Reviews for Better Research Software - 2022-10-12 (Online).
• 1st International Conference on FAIR Digital Objects - 2022-10-26 to 2022-10-28 (Leiden, The Netherlands). We have been living a data revolution for decades now. Every day, peta bytes of information of all kinds are generated and made accessible on the Internet. The amount of information is so massive that soon, it will no longer be feasible for us to process it manually. What to do then?
• N8 CIR Machine Learning Theme Launch - 2022-11-01, The University of Leeds. Open to all researchers, PGRs and anyone involved in Machine Learning at an N8 institution, this event will bring the Machine Learning community from across N8 together to find out more about N8 CIR, plans for the theme and all-important networking opportunities.
• PyData Global 2022 - 2022-12-01 to 2022-12-03, Online. The PyData Global conference is an opportunity to listen, learn, and share knowledge about best practices, new approaches, and emerging technologies for data management, processing, analytics, and visualization.

Training

Research IT Training

Research IT is providing a place for beginners or advanced users to expand their knowledge of HPC and different programming languages. The courses are part of the Doctoral Development Programme. For more information please visit our training registration web page (via VPN): crs.shef.ac.uk.

Git & GitHub through GitKraken workshop - from Zero to Hero!

This is an introductory course, teaching the git and GitHub skills required to manage research code over it’s development lifecycle. These skills are essential for collaborative research teams. This two half-day course is being ran multiple times in the coming months:

• 2022-10-03 & 2022-10-04 (Sold Out)
• 2022-10-31 & 2022-11-01 (Register via eventbrite)
• 2022-11-28 & 2022-11-29 (Register via eventbrite)

Opportunities

Funding

• Software Sustainability Institute Fellowships - 2023 applications now open! The Institute’s Fellowship Programme provides funding for individuals who want to improve how research software is done in their domains, fields and/or areas of work. Being a Fellow also helps individuals develop skills and knowledge in their area of software sustainability, empowers them to speak about software sustainability issues and network with like-minded individuals from a wide variety of backgrounds. See here for more details! Deadline 2022-10-03.
• Get up to 12 days of software engineering support for your HPC/ML/GPU project. The Research Software Engineering team is offering to support researchers with the use of High Performance Computing (HPC), Machine Learning (ML) and Graphics Processors (GPUs) in their research projects. All researchers at our University can receive up to £5,000 of support time, or roughly 12 days of support, provided by a Research Software Engineer (RSE). This call aims to increase the uptake of the University’s Tier 2 HPC resources, which are national facilities available to researchers in all faculties. This is an open call and applications are considered on a first-come-first-served basis. The deadline for submitting your application is 2022-09-16. Applications received after this date will be reviewed in the next round.
• ARCHER2 Embedded CSE (eCSE) Support Call. The ARCHER2 eCSE call provides funding for up to 18 person months of an RSE/PDRA to work on codes to run on ARCHER2. The deadline for submitting documents for technical evaluations is 2022-10-04 16:00 BST with a final proposal deadline of 2022-10-25 16:00 BST.
• ARCHER2 Early Career eCSE Panel Observers Call. The eCSE Panel Meeting is the meeting where eCSE proposals are reviewed and decisions are made on which proposals to fund. As part of our commitment to encouraging and developing Early Career Researchers, we are offering a small number of places to such researchers to attend the eCSE panel meeting as Early Career Observers. The aim is to give Early Career Researchers a better insight into this competitive selection process, to assist them in the preparation of future funding proposals. The deadline for applying to attend the panel meeting as an observer is 2022-10-04 16:00 BST.
• CHIST-ERA Open & Re-usable Research Data & Software. This call tackles the challenge of open research data and software from the perspective of their possible reuse. The objective is to create the conditions for research in any domain based on open or shared data and software. Call deadline: 2022-12-14 17:00 CET

LunchBytes

LunchBytes needs YOU!

LunchBytes are organised by and for the research software community at The University of Sheffield. If you’d like to curate a session on a topic or present something, get in touch by emailing lunchbytes-organisers-group@sheffield.ac.uk - Or suggest topics on the jamboard.

Support

Code Clinics

Why not come to a Code Clinic? We’re keen to hear from you.

Code Clinics are fortnightly supported sessions run by the RSE team and IT Services’ Research and Innovation IT (ITS R&I) team. They are open to anyone at TUoS writing code for research to get help with programming problems and general advice on best practices.

At each session, members of the RSE and/or ITS R&I teams will be available to review code, advise, troubleshoot, and suggest ways to improve your computational workflows.

Research IT HPC Drop In

HPC Drop-In sessions are providing assistance with HPC related user issues such as challenges in scaling an application from desktop to supercomputer. We are considering extending the number of our sessions to two or three weekly. These interactive sessions could provide a better interface with our users than our non-interactive ticketing system. These sessions are advertised on the HPC mailing list.

Research IT Consultations

Alongside the HPC Drop-In sessions, Research IT are also running one to one consultations to solve in depth user specific problems. These consultations can be booked via our webpage. If you are interested please visit the following link: https://students.sheffield.ac.uk/it-services/research/support.

Sheffield RSE Team

The Sheffield RSE Team aims to collaborate with you to help improve your research software.

They can provide dedicated staff to ensure that you can deliver excellent research software engineering on your research projects.

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

Research IT

The Research and Innovation Team within IT directly supports research, both academic and commercial. We provide large scale HPC systems, advice on everything from statistics to ML to data pipelines and training for both students and staff. Working with academics, our staff are embedded within research groups on both long and short term engagements.