February 2026

Welcome everyone to the JuRSE newsletter for February!

JuRSE (Jülich Research Software Engineering) is a grassroots community for all FZJ scientists and students who code and anyone interested in research software. 

The purpose of this newsletter is to update you about JuRSE community initiatives at FZJ and some of the national and international activities in Research Software Engineering (RSE) and inspire you to get involved in the community.  Please feel free to forward this to any colleagues who may be interested in this topic and in joining the JuRSE Community.

Quick ways you can get involved:
Join the RSE Rocketchat channel open to all FZJ staff
Join the national RSE Community on matrix hosted by the de-RSE Association.
JuRSE is now on Linkedin! Connect with us

International RSE Survey

Take the 2026 International RSE Survey! This large-scale survey only runs every 3-4 years and helps us better understand what research software engineers need and how we can advocate for the community. 

If you write code for academic research as part of your work, we want to hear from you. You don’t have to be called a research software engineer to complete the survey. Your formal job title doesn't matter.  

Parts of the survey have been adapted specifically for Germany to give everyone who works on research software in Germany the chance to share their wishes and expectations for the evolution of our national RSE ecosystem. This RSE Survey produces an incredibly valuable trove of data that anyone can use to understand the RSE community, including national associations, funders and policymakers. Please help us provide this data and support the RSE community by completing the survey.

Take the survey here

JuRSE 

Open Hours

The main discussions in this month's open-hour revolved around Python and how to organise dependencies, code structure, and automate deployments while making sure dependencies are met.

We host Open Hours every Wednesday both in-person in the gegenüber lounge in the ZB and online. All are welcome to come and talk to us about anything. This is an opportunity to learn from each other and expand our collective knowledge.  Always exciting to see and help with your projects.

Code of the Month

The JuRSE Team wants to shine a spotlight on the diverse and excellent research software that is being developed at Forschungszentrum Jülich. The code highlighted in February is ETHOS.FINE, which is developed at the Institute of Climate and Energy Systems, Jülich Systems Analysis (ICE-2). The Framework for Integrated Energy System Assessment (FINE) is part of the Energy Transformation PatHway Optimization Suite (ETHOS) and provides a framework for modelling, optimising, and assessing energy systems. ETHOS.FINE is an integral part of the ETHOS model suite with an impressive number of mentions on GitHub. Find out more on the JuRSE website.

 Blog Posts

HiRSE 

HiRSE Seminar Series

On Friday, 20th February at 11:00 CET, Dirk Feuchter from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology will join us at the HiRSE Seminar Series to talk about “Before Distributing Research Software - Impulses from an RSE&TTO-Perspective”

HiRSE is now on Linkedin! Connect with us

National Initiatives    

  • HIDA mobility Program: The HIDA Mobility Program enables short-term research stays (1- 3 months) for all Helmholtz doctoral researchers and postdocs (employed at or affiliated with a Helmholtz Center), whose work is linked to (applied) data and information sciences. Applications are now being accepted on an ongoing basis.

· HIFIS: Did you know that HIFIS has many great resources available including software engineering consulting services?

·       Helmholtz Research Software Directory: The Research Software Directory is where you can promote and discover research software from Helmholtz centres. After recent updates to the directory, you can now nominate yourself for a spotlight on their website to showcase your research software and they've introduced some more functionality to make integration easier.

Events  

  • deRSE26 – Conference for Research Software Engineering in Germany
    The registration for the 6th German conference on Research Software Engineering is now open. It will be organised and hosted by the University of Stuttgart and Informatik-Forum Stuttgart on the 3rd - 5th of March. As a venue for the diverse community of people concerned with research software, it values contributions from all levels of experience and across scientific disciplines, geographic locations, genders, and ethnicities. There will be talks, posters, and demos, as well as interactive formats like tutorials, workshops, meet-ups, and hackathons.
  • Collaborations Workshop 2026 (CW26)
    The Software Sustainability Institute's annual Collaborations Workshop will take place as a hybrid event from Tuesday 28th April to Thursday 30th April 2026 at ICC Belfast. This immersive, three-day unconference emphasises active collaborations, dynamic discussions, and hands-on problem-solving.
  • JuliaCon 2026
    JuliaCon Global 2026 will be an in-person conference held in Mainz, Germany, 10-15 August 2026.  JuliaCon will include talks from from developers and researchers from industry and academia covering a wide range of topics such as biology, economics, data analytics, and software engineering best pratices.
    The call for proposals will close on Feb 28th 2026.
  • Neuroinformatics Unit Open Source Summer School (OSSS)
    Applications are now open for the second Neuroinformatics Unit Open Source Summer School (OSSS), August 17-28 2026 in London, U.K. The aim of OSSS is to teach open-source software to process neuroscience data and to bring together researchers and RSEs to build a more sustainable ecosystem around these tools. (call closed)
  • SciPy 2026
    The SciPY 2026 Call for Proposals is Open! SciPy 2026 will take place from July 13-19, hosted at University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, MN, USA. The talk, tutorial, and poster submission deadline is February 25th, 2026 but as you can make edits to your proposals after submission up until the deadline submit early! This year the conference will have two highlighted tracks, Spirit of SciPy and, Data-Driven Discovery, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence as well as six specialized tracks.

Recommended Reading & Tools

RSE Podcast Episodes

  • After a short break, #code4thought is back with a new season. And a birthday season, too, because the podcast is 5 years old! Today's trailer gives you an idea of what lies ahead between now and the end of June. Out now on your podcast app, YouTube and Buzzsprout
  • ULC for Code in Research

Further Training Opportunities

HiDA Training courses

There are lots of courses available to you for free from Helmholtz Information & Data Science Academy (HIDA) so check out what's available here

 Training at FZJ: 

 JSC OpenStack Training (training course, online)

Instructors: Sebastian Achilles, Prateek Gautam, Björn Hagemeier, Tim Kreuzer
Dates: 17 February 2026, 09:00-12:00 and 13:30-15:30
Venue: online
Abstract: https://go.fzj.de/2026-openstack
Registration until 10 February 2026:  https://indico3-jsc.fz-juelich.de/event/282/

Running and Scaling Performant Deep Learning Models on JSC Supercomputers (training course, online, 1st run)

Instructors: Sabrina Benassou, Ismail Khalfaoui, Javad Kasravi
Dates: 10-12 March 2026, 13:00-17:00 each day
Venue: online
Abstract: https://go.fzj.de/2026-ai-sc-1
Registration until 3 March 2026:  https://indico3-jsc.fz-juelich.de/event/299/

Einführung in ParaView zur Visualisierung von wissenschaftlichen Daten (training course, online)

Instructor: Dr. Herwig Zilken
Dates: 11-12 March 2026, 09:00-12:00 each day
Venue: online
Abstract: https://go.fzj.de/2026-paraview
Registration until 4 March 2026:  https://indico3-jsc.fz-juelich.de/event/275/

GPU Programming Part 1: Foundations (training course, on-site)

Instructors: Jan Meinke, Andreas Herten, Kaveh Haghighi-Mood (JSC), Laura Morgenstern (NVIDIA)
Dates: 24-26 March 2026, 09:00-16:30 each day
Venue: Jülich Supercomputing Centre, building 16.3, room 213a (Ausbildungsraum 1)
Abstract: https://go.fzj.de/2026-gpu-cuda
Registration until 10 March 2026:  https://indico3-jsc.fz-juelich.de/event/294/

That’s it for February! Send us any RSE content that you’d like in the newsletter and join us on the RSE Rocketchat channel!

Last Modified: 06.07.2026