October 2025

Welcome everyone to the JuRSE newsletter for October!

JuRSE (Jülich Research Software Engineering) is a grassroots community for all FZJ scientists and students who code and/or 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.

Two quick ways you can get involved:

JuRSE

We want to hear from you!

Are you coding in your research role at Forschungszentrum Jülich? The Jülich Research Software Engineering (JuRSE) team is reaching out to you to better understand your work, challenges, and needs. Your insights will directly shape the resources, services, and events we provide for our coding community at FZJ. This survey will take about 10 minutes to complete and feel free to forward this link to colleagues. To the survey.  

Travel Grants Available

JuRSE has launched a travel grant program for the deRSE26 conference, open for everyone including FZJ employees. We are taking applications until November 7. More info here.

Open Hours

We host Open Hours every Wednesday both in-person in the gegenuber 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.

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 pick of October 2025 is JUBE, generic, lightweight, and configurable environment to run, monitor, and analyse application execution in a systematic way. This software is commonly used to execute benchmarks and complex workflows on High-Performance Computers, but is not limited to these systems. Find out more on the JuRSE website.

JuRSE Training

We have a number of training courses coming up this Fall organized and funded by JuRSE. All are invited to participate!

  • Continuous Integration for Research Code

Join us on the 9th October from 10:00am – 12:00 online.  More information and registration.

  • Python Packaging  

Join us on the 27th October online.  More information and registration information can be found on the JuRSE website soon.

  • Software Architectures for Research Software

Taking place in November 2025. More information and registration information can be found on the JuRSE website soon.

Blog Posts

HiRSE

HiRSE Seminar Series

Join us in celebrating International RSE Day on Thursday 9th October at 2pm CEST at our next HiRSE Seminar where we will hear from Felicity Anderson from the University of Edinburgh. She will expand on her award-winning poster from the deRSE25 with a talk titled ‘Who do you Think You Are? Creating RSE personas from GitHub interactions in Research Software Repositories’. More here.

Summer of Programming Languages

This summer, the HiRSE seminar series ‘Summer of Programming Languages’ featured, Rust, R Julia, Python, Fortran, C++ and Chapel and it was a success! All videos can be found on the HiRSE You Tube Channel.

National Initiatives

  • Call for Contributions for the deRSE26 Conference happening in Stuttgart in March 2026 is now open!
  • FutuRSI – RSE Survey: The FutuRSI project is developing a prototype service organization for research software development with distributed teams to evaluate how such a service should be designed at the federal level.  The purpose of this survey is to gather knowledge on the existing services of research software engineering (RSE) teams in Germany. This knowledge will be included in reports to funders on the RSE eco-system and will inform the creation of a federal level organisation for research software development. In this context, we consider RSE teams as groups of people who are helping other researchers with their research software, e.g., by consultancy, by community building, by providing training, by teaching RSE competencies, or by direct software development. If your team does some or all of this, we invite you to contribute to this survey.  Take the survey here.
  • 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.

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. Check out the details here.

Events

  • Distribits 2025 meeting and hackathon - October 23-25, Düsseldorf, Germany (and online) - Distribits is back for the second year running to bring together researchers, developers, and other data enthusiasts to exchange ideas and learn the latest developments around distributed data management technologies. Registration is free and now open.
  • Software Management Plans supporting FAIR and Open-Source Software in NFDI - Nov 18, 2025 02:00 PM CEST, Online – A virtual workshop where Dr. Leyla Jael Castro will introduce Software Management Plans and will explore how they support FAIR for research software and contribute to the adoption of good practices for open-source software development. Registration is open.
  • Research Software Engineers in HPC - Sunday, November 16, 2025, 8:30 am - 5:00 pm CST (UTC-6), St. Louis, MO & 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. More here.
  • GAMM RSE & RDM Kick-Off meeting – December 4-5, 2025: The GAMM Activity Group on Research Software Engineering and Research Data Management in Mathematics & Mechanics will formally start on Dec 4-5, 2025, at Technical University of Braunschweig with a lunch-to-lunch kickoff meeting. If you are interested in math, mechanics, RSE, RDM, and/or some wild mixture of this, the activity group and this kickoff meeting is a great place to exchange thoughts! Join us for this kickoff meeting here, with or without a talk: And no worries, you won't be alone there. We have two great keynote speakers at the interface of RSE & RDM and CSE: Philipp Birken (University of Lund) and Jörg Unger (Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung). If you are interested in the activity group but cannot attend the kickoff, you can join our mailing list to stay in touch.

Recommended Reading & Tools

RSE Podcasts Episodes

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

Training at FZJ:

  • Parallel I/O and Portable Data Formats (training course, online)

Dates: 27 October 2025, 09:00-14:30, 28-29 October, 09:00-12:30

Registration until 20 October 2025

  • High-performance scientific computing in C++ (training course, online)

Dates: 27-30 October 2025, 09:00-16:30; mornings: three lectures with very short exercises - 09:00-10:00, 10:15-11:15, 11:30-12:30; afternoons: intensive exercises - 13:30-16:30

Registration until 20 October 2025.

  • Directive-based GPU programming with OpenACC (training course, online)

Dates: 28-30 October 2025, 09:00-13:00 each day

Registration until 21 October 2025.

  • Introduction to Supercomputing at JSC - Theory & Practice (training course, online)

Dates: 10-13 November 2025, 13:00-17:00 each day

Registration until 3 November 2025.

Last Modified: 15.10.2025