August 2024 Newsletter

The University of Sheffield Research Software Engineering Community Newsletter August 2024

Welcome to the August 2024 newsletter for the research software community at The University of Sheffield, featuring news, opportunities, events and training for you.

News

Thank you to everyone who applied for the 2024 RSE collaboration call for proposals. This call is now closed.

We received 26(!) applications from across the University. We have reviewed all proposals and sent notifications to applicants. The successful projects that will receive six months 0.5 FTE RSE support are…

• PolyChron: A tool for archaeologists for the management of absolute and relative dating evidence - Bryony Moody (School of Mathematics)
• HYBIRD: a Particle-Fluid Engineering Simulation Tool (HYPFEST) - Alessandro Leonardi (Civil Engineering)
• Tools to analyse splice-aware SLAMseq - Ian Sudbery (School of Biosciences)

Events

Upcoming events in Sheffield

• Register for OpenFest 2024
  • 2024/09/10 - 2024/09/12. Co-delivered by the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, OpenFest is our flagship celebration and exploration of open research, providing an opportunity to explore current issues, share experiences, and consider how open research can be applied in your discipline.

Upcoming external events

• SSI Fellowship program launch webinar
  • 2024/08/22 @ 11GMT+1 The SSI’s Fellowship Programme funds researchers, software engineers and advocates who want to improve computational practice in their domains, fields and/or areas of work.
• CodeRefinery workshop
  • 2024/09/10-12 and 17-19. Free workshop on git, testing, documentation, and more in a workshop - for researchers and scientists.
• Sustainable HPC State of the Practice
  • 2024/09/24 The demand for ever more-capable high performance computing (HPC) is driving significant changes across the design and manufacturing space, as manufacturers turn to heterogeneous systems that integrate increasing die-count, from multi-core CPUs to accelerators, traditional memory architectures to high-bandwidth memory, modern interconnects, and massive storage servers. These designs require substantially higher energy, with commensurate methods for managing heat, in increasingly dense packages. To effectively manage and operate these systems, HPC and Data Center (DC) practitioners must balance and coordinate constraints across many domains: environment, utilities, data center, HPC system hardware and software, and end-user applications.
• 6th Annual HPC-AI UK conference 2024.
  • 2024/10/15-16. As the field of simulation and AI continues to evolve, it is imperative to address crucial challenges concerning responsible practices, sustainability, and collaborative efforts. This conference aims to explore these topics and more with a centralized theme of “Democratising HPC and AI Opportunities.”
• Sustainability and Renewable Energy Challenge
  • Deadline 2025/01/03.We are excited to announce the second edition of the MathWorks Sustainability and Renewable Energy Challenge! We invite you to submit innovative solutions to environmental challenges related to sustainability and renewable energy. Select a project from our list and submit a solution to be eligible to win up to $1,000 (USD). Showcase your creativity and contribute to a more sustainable future!
• DRI Retreat 2025
  • 2025/01/13 - 2025/01/17: This five-day residential retreat will again take place in Manchester and comprises panel discussions and group sessions for technology specialists to develop soft skills and network with peers. This national event is open to software engineers, infrastructure engineers, data managers, academics, and industry professionals at any stage of their careers. We encourage those new to these fields to attend. Paid accommodation is offered to all in-person attendees.

Articles, Blogs, Papers & Podcasts

Articles & Blogs

• Upgrading R to at least version 4.4.0

• The impact of AI on Computer Science Education

Papers

• 6 Steps Toward Reproducible Research

• Open Archaeology, Open Source? Collaborative practices in an emerging community of archaeological software engineers

Podcasts

• Code for Thought: Digital Research Academy - A Grassroots Network for Trainers

• Code for Thought: The Turing Way Part 2: Fram Handbook to Community.

Training

For more forthcoming RSE training events, keep an eye on our Training page and join our mailing list to hear about new events.

Jobs

• Check for advertised RSE and RSE-adjacent roles at the RSE society’s vacancies board

Community

Digital Research Practice Support Community

The DRPS community is a group for people that support researchers in carrying out research in the digital age. Meetings are held monthly, with discussions around events, training and opportunities related to the field.

You can join the google group here to stay informed.

The next meeting is scheduled for 2pm on Wednesday 14th August 2024.

Support

Code Clinics

Why not come to a Code Clinic? We’re keen to help 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.

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.