August 2024

We hope you’re enjoying your summer break and welcome to the new joiners! This newsletter’s purpose is to update you at the FZJ, national and international level in Research Software Engineering. Please feel free to forward this to any colleagues who may be interested in this topic and in joining the JuRSE Community (https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/rse/jurse-community). 

JuRSE news

Some of the discussions during Open Hours in the past month centered around automating the release process and managing containers, including large, multi-platform containers, with GitHub Actions. Other topics covered were communication with measuring devices, and challenges on sharing stand alone Python packages with domain science users who lack programming experience. We also welcomed new researchers who joined to say hello. We are currently taking a summer break for the JuRSE Open Hours and will resume on August 14! Hope everyone is enjoying their summer and we look forward to seeing you soon!

Code of the Month
The JuRSE Team want to shine a spotlight on the diverse and excellent research software that is being primarily developed at Forschungszentrum Jülich and to do this we’re showcasing one research software a month. August’s Code of the Month is Heat (https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/rse/jurse-community/jurse-code-of-the-month/august-2024). Heat is a flexible and seamless open-source software for high performance data analytics and machine learning. It provides highly optimized algorithms and data structures for tensor computations using CPUs, GPUs and distributed cluster systems on top of MPI.

HiRSE News

Promoting research software: Made in Germany
TL;DR: Help us to promote your software here: https://go.fzj.de/research_software_promotion . More than 30 codes so far. Keep them coming!

Researchers, postdocs, and students at German universities and research centres write great research software. The HiRSE team wants to make that more visible by bringing your software to the attention of the RSE Community and beyond. We’re looking for research software created, extended and/or maintained by people working at German institutions to join our latest initiative. This is not meant exclusively, we of course welcome also software written by international teams, as long as there is a substantial contribution coming from Germany.

Here is our offer: You provide us with the details of your software using our formhttps://go.fzj.de/research_software_promotion and we’ll create your promo slide that will be shown ahead of a HiRSE Seminar and during HiRSE event breaks. Also, we will create a video out of all these slides and put it on the HiRSE YouTube channel. If you have more ideas where this slide can be used, feel free to let us know (and use it yourself, of course)! An example of such a slide can be seen here:https://syncandshare.desy.de/index.php/s/GQRsT26GQE2GKnk

If you have any questions or would like to suggest a project that is not your own, please do not hesitate to contact us hirse@fz-juelich.de.

National initiatives

First Helmholtz Software Award has been presented!
You may remember, about a year ago, that this competition was launched and we had an internal call for FZJ software. Well, the winners have been announced and you can read about them here:https://hifis.net/news/2024/07/18/sw-award-final.html  Unfortunately FZJ didn’t take an award this time even though we put three really great software proposals but there’s always next time.

And that next time is very soon! The next call is being launched this August and more information on how to get involved will be sent out soon.

NFDI: Basic service nfdi.software is funded
nfdi.software aims to create a central marketplace to improve access to NFDI research data and software, addressing the needs of various scientific disciplines for sustainable research software use and development. More info: https://base4nfdi.de/projects/nfdi-software

Survey for sharing practices for research software
A call was sent out by Dr. Leyla Jael Castro asking for participants to this short survey. They are looking to conduct analysis on sharing practices for research software.https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfMnSSEW91fP7qYOAOiSGoff80ur-MkObT-_8SJ7NcoTpqTGA/viewform

HIDA courses
On November 24, the 4. Helmholtz Reproductibility Workshop will take place at MDC-BIMSB in Berlin. Keynotes will be live-streamed online. Registration will open in September.https://events.hifis.net/event/1750/

Registration open for “Helmholtz Summer School – From Data to Knowledge”, taking place from September 16 – 27, 2024. The five Information & Data Science platforms Helmholtz AI, Helmholtz Imaging, HIFIS, HIDA and HMC have crafted a two-week program to cater to participants with diverse backgrounds and interests. We offer a wide array of course packages, ensuring that you find the perfect fit regardless of your level of expertise. https://events.hifis.net/event/1590/

More courses from HIDA are in the HIDA Course Catalog. https://www.helmholtz-hida.de/course-catalog/

International initiatives

Software Sustainability Institute – Fellowship Programme
Are you passionate about research software or digital research infrastructure? The SSI Fellowship Programme will open for applications on Monday 12 August! Join a dynamic community of over 200 Fellows, gain mentorship, and receive £4000 for events. Whether you’re starting your career or leading projects, they welcome diverse backgrounds. Don’t miss this chance to shape the future of research software practice. Get ready to apply! An introductory Fellowship Programme Launch Webinar will be held on Thursday 22 August, from 11:00-12:00 (BST/GMT+1). Find out more athttps://www.software.ac.uk/programmes/fellowship-programme/apply-fellowship-programme

RSE podcast episodes

Code for Thought podcast
Code for Thought is a community podcast for research software engineers and researchers who code. It was created and is produced by Peter Schmidt. He has been a research software engineer his whole career and now dedicates himself to bringing the diverse range of research software engineering to the forefront. He releases English and German language episodes on a regular schedule.

In July, he released episodes about:

  • Dr AJ Lauer from Thriving Ibis, an organisation that aims to make the tech workplace, and in particular HPC, more open and welcoming. AJ has been working with Women in HPC and was the inclusivity chair for SC21 in St Louis. https://codeforthought.buzzsprout.com

Upcoming RSE conferences

EuroSciPy 2024 - 16th European Conference on Python in Science
The EuroSciPy meeting is a cross-disciplinary gathering focused on the use and development of the Python language in scientific research. This event strives to bring together both users and developers of scientific tools, as well as academic research and state of the art industry.https://euroscipy.org/2024/index.html

RSECon24
Remote participation tickets are still available for the first and largest RSE conference. The RSECon24 in the UK is their 8th annual conference in September in Newcastle. (https://rsecon24.society-rse.org/) 

US RSECon24
Registration is open for the US RSE conference and Albuquerque is the location for the 2nd annual conference (https://us-rse.org/usrse24/) from October 15th to 17th. This year’s theme is ‘Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: A celebration of all that RSEs have done for computing in the past, in the present, and in the future’.

European Carpentry Connect Event, 12-14 Nov, Heidelberg, Germany
The second European CarpentryConnect event (https://biont-training.eu/event-details/CarpentryConnect2024) will be held in Heidelberg on 12-14 November 2024 under the theme “Community-led training beyond academia” with the aim to bring the Carpentries and BioNT communities together to explore and discuss community-led software and data skills training as well as capacity building initiatives. Learn more about the event and the types of sessions that can be proposed in the announcement blog post: https://carpentries.org/blog/2024/02/cchd24-call-for-proposals/

Call for Abstracts: Research Software Engineers in HPC - To be held as part of SC24, Atlanta, GA, USA and online.
This workshop will bring together RSEs and allies involved in HPC, from all over the world, to grow the RSE community by establishing and strengthening professional networks of current RSEs and RSE leaders. Participants will hear about successes and challenges that RSEs and RSE groups have experienced, and discuss ways to increase awareness of RSE opportunities and improve support for RSEs. Please visit the website to stay informed about key dates https://us-rse.org/rse-hpc-2024/.

Last Modified: 01.03.2025