September 2024
Welcome everyone to the JuRSE Community mailing list for September and particularly welcome to all the new joiners! It’s great that you’ve found us. JuRSE (Jülich Research Software Engineering) is a grassroots community for all FZJ scientists who code and/or anyone interested in any aspect of research software. (https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/rse)
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.
Please feel free to forward this to any colleagues who may be interested in this topic and in joining the JuRSE Community.
Did you know that there is an RSE Rocketchat channel just for FZJ employees? You can join it here https://chat.fz-juelich.de/invite/krTNBT
JuRSE news
Helmholtz Software Award 2024
The Helmholtz Software Award 2024 is in its second year and is now open for proposals. We’ve launched the FZJ Call for Nominations this week and are looking for nominations from across FZJ. The award scheme aims to highlight the importance and development of sustainable, professional and high-quality research software at the same time as acknowledging the achievements of research software developers. Find out more about the prizes and how you can nominate your software - https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/rse/the_latest/call-for-proposals-the-helmholtz-software-award-2024
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.
September’s Code of the Month is LiberTEM. LiberTEM is an open source platform for high-throughput distributed processing of large-scale binary data sets and live data streams using a stream-based programming model. The current focus is pixelated scanning transmission electron microscopy (4DSTEM) and scanning electron beam diffraction data.
Click through to our website to find out what the JuRSE team like about this software.
JuRSE website
We’ve given it a mini revamp and we hope it’s now easier to find all the community initiatives that exist for scientists who code at FZJ. Check out our new landing page: https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/rse
Open Hours (every Wednesday - https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/rse/community-initiatives/jurse-open-hours)
We resumed our Open Hours in mid August after a summer break. Over the past two weeks we have had good conversations around factors to consider when restructuring scientific code, the important role of testing throughout the process, and a good project layout/organization (i.e. content of top file and subdirectories). Another discussion that took place was about clarifying a workflow when using a HPC system.
Every first Wednesday of the month, we host a ‘topical Open Hour’ where we pick a topic to discuss. On Wednesday September 4th, during our topical Open Hour, we will be discussing the topics within lesson 3 "Code and Software" from the workshop "Good Enough Practices in Scientific Computing" (https://carpentries-lab.github.io/good-enough-practices/03-software.html ). This is an opportunity to learn from each other and expand our collective knowledge so everyone is welcome to join. If you have other unrelated topics or questions, feel free to come along as usual, and we will accommodate for that as well.
Forschungszentrum joins Linux Foundation
As of August 6, 2024, Forschungszentrum Jülich is now an associate member of the Linux Foundation (LF). The LF is a non-profit organization founded in 2000 to support Linux development and open source software projects in general. In addition to providing a neutral, trusted hub for developers and organizations, the LF is dedicated to building sustainable ecosystems around open source software in order to accelerate technological development and support a transfer to the economy.
More info on what that means for FZJ employees: https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/rse/the_latest/fzj-joins-linux-foundation
HiRSE News (HiRSE: https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/rse/collaborations/hirse_ps)
The JuRSE team work closely with the HiRSE project so we include their news here too.
Promoting research software: Made in Germany
TL;DR: Help us to promote your software here: https://go.fzj.de/research_software_promotion. More than 40 codes registered so far. Keep them coming!
Check out the codes that are already taking part in this video: - https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/rse/community-initiatives/the-hirse-code-promotion
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 under hirse@fz-juelich.de.
Helmholtz Software Award Winners 2023
As part of the HiRSE seminar series (https://www.helmholtz-hirse.de/series.html), we are hosting a seminar on the 23rd September at 13:15 where we will hear from the award winners for the Helmholtz Software Award in 2023. It’s open to the public and everyone is welcome. More details here: https://www.helmholtz-hirse.de/series/2024_09_23-seminar_32.html
National Initiatives
HIDA course catalogue
There are a lot of great courses available at the Helmholtz Information & Data Science Academy (HIDA) for scientists who code. We recommend that you keep an eye on the courses here: https://www.helmholtz-hida.de/course-catalog/en/
International Initiatives
WHPC travel grant to SC24
The NHR Women in HPC (NHR|WHPC) chapter is pleased to announce the current call for applications for travel grants for the SC 24 Conference (https://sc24.supercomputing.org/)in Atlanta (Nov. 17-20, 2024). The NHR Alliance is offering travel grants worth up to € 2,500 to encourage early-career researchers and diversity in the HPC sciences. Applicants must be affiliated with a German university and attend SC 24 conference - accepted contributions are not required! Theapplication deadline is September 30, 2024. Further information and the application form can be found on the NHR Women in HPC (NHR|WHPC) chapter’s website (https://www.nhr-verein.de/whpc)
Upcoming RSE conferences
US RSE 2024
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 Speakers - PyLadiesCon 2024
PyLadiesCon will take place online, December 6th - 8th, 2024. They will be hosting the talks at different timezones to be inclusive of the global community. There will be no cost to attend the conference. The call for proposals will close on September 15th. PyLadies is an international mentorship group with a focus on helping more women become active participants and leaders in the Python open source community. https://pretalx.com/pyladiescon-2024/cfp