March 2023 Newsletter

30 March 2023 01:00

The University of Sheffield Research Software Engineering Community Newsletter March 2023

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

Web and Publications

Events

Training

Research IT Training

Research IT courses have adopted a hybrid approach. The team will be providing their courses both online and in person for the first time since March 2020. The team provides 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.

If a course is “sold out” please join the wait list by signing up - we regularly email people to encourage those that can no longer attend to cancel. Those on the wait list get early notification when the courses are run again.

UNIX Shell Fundamentals

The Unix shell (which you may know as the terminal, console, or ‘bash’) has been around longer than most of its users have been alive. It has survived because it’s a powerful tool that allows users to perform complex and powerful tasks, often with just a few keystrokes or lines of code. It helps users automate repetitive tasks and easily combine smaller tasks into larger, more powerful workflows. Use of the shell is fundamental to a wide range of advanced computing tasks, including high-performance computing. This lesson will introduce you to this powerful tool.

Opportunities

Jobs

LunchBytes

LunchBytes are a monthly series of short talks from the research community on research software, data, and infrastructure.

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 IT 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 Research IT 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.

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

Research 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.

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.