Welcome to the January 2025 newsletter for the research software community at The University of Sheffield, featuring news, opportunities, events and training for you.
This training curriculum offers a modular programme to support researchers in applying FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles and open research practices to their research software. The programme is aimed at researchers, including PhDs and postgraduate research students at the University of Sheffield, who create code (whether a few scripts or something more substantial) as part of their research and who want to make their research more open by applying the FAIR principles to their software or simply want to become more confident in the research code they are writing.
To find out what the FAIR principles are and why they are crucial to make your research more open, you can watch the introductory talk by Head of Research Software Engineering, Romain Thomas, Better software for Better research: Introduction to the FAIR2 for Research Software training programme. You can also view the slides for this talk.
The FAIR2 for research software training programme has been developed by the RSE, Data Analytics Service and Library teams and launched in October. The full syllabus is now live on MyDevelopment (requires login). The programme will be continuing over the next few months, with the following courses now scheduled:
Check for advertised RSE and RSE-adjacent roles at the RSE society’s vacancies board.
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 to stay informed. Next meeting: Wednesday 29th January 2025 at 2pm.
LunchBytes are short talks from the research community on research software, data, and infrastructure.
Due to capacity within the RSE team, there was very limited LunchBytes content over the past academic year. This should be changing soon, a new coordinator for LunchBytes has been found (Research IT’s Farhad Allian), with a plan to reboot these lunchtime seminars in the spring semester.
More information will be coming out over the coming months, so sign up to the RSE mailing list if you’d like to learn more about research software and associated practices, or get in contact with Farhad if you would like to share what you know at an upcoming session!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.