September 2025
Welcome everyone to the JuRSE newsletter for September!
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:
- Join the RSE Rocket.Chat channel open to all FZJ staff
- Join the national RSE Community on matrix hosted by the de-RSE Association.
JuRSE
Open Hours
The Open Hours have taken a short summer break but we will be back again every Wednesday starting on 24th September. 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 so everyone is welcome to join. Open Hours are both in-person and online. Learn more.
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 September 2025 is JEMRIS (Jülich Extensible Magnetic Resonance Imaging Simulator), an extensible MRI simulation framework which provides an MRI sequence development and simulation environment for the MRI community. JEMRIS is co-developed at the Institute for Bio- and Geosciences - Plant Sciences (IBG-2). Find out more on the JuRSE website. Learn More.
JuRSE Training
We have a number of training courses coming up this Autumn organized and funded by JuRSE. All are invited to participate!
- “Introduction to Containerization with Podman/Docker/Kubernetes”
Join us on the 23rd September from 13:00 - 16:00 in the Zentralbibliothek (ZB), Seminar room 301. This in-person training is an introduction to the concept of packaging software and its dependencies into a single portable unit. This approach enables consistent and reliable execution of applications across different environments using containers. More information and signup.
- “Testing for Research Software”
Join us on the 30th September from 10:00am – 12:30 online. In this workshop we will learn how to use tests in academic research code. More information and registration.
- Community Building for Software Projects
Join us on the 1st October from 10:00am – 12:00 online. Are you part of a software development team and looking to improve collaboration? In this workshop, we’ll explore how to build strong and effective software development teams by caring about team dynamics and creating a welcoming space. By the end of this session, participants will have concrete ideas on how to foster motivation and improve collaboration within their teams. More information and registration.
- Continuous Integration for Research Code
Join us on the 9th October from 10:00am – 12:00 online. In this workshop we will learn role and benefits of Continuous Integration (CI) in research software development, how to set up a basic CI pipeline using GitHub Actions, how to automate testing, linting, and dependency management of research code, and much more. More information and registration. More information and registration.
Blog Posts & Shout Outs
HiRSE
Summer of Programming Languages
HiRSE as launched a new seminar series ‘Summer of Programming Languages’!
Ever wondered "Am I using a suitable programming language for this task?" or "‘I’m always using the same language but is there a better language out there for this?" Then the HiRSE Summer of Programming Languages seminar series has answers.
We have launched the HiRSE Summer of Programming Languages seminar series to provide some examples to help answer the question of which language can be used for what purpose, focusing on concrete examples and tips for the creation of Research Software. The series is designed to be a resource of concise online talks on the HiRSE YouTube channel that the RSE community can use at any time. Our presenters showcase a language, presenting what they feel are the important aspects of the language, the environment and tools around it, as well as the advantages and disadvantages for people who create research software.
Thus far, we have featured: Rust, R, Julia, Python, Fortran, & C++. Stay tuned for a few more! Visit the HiRSE YouTube Channel to learn more.
National Initiatives
- 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.
RSE Podcast Episodes
“Welcome to the autumn and winter season of Code for Thought”
Recommended Reading & Tools"
- LLM in a Box Template”- USRSE members, Georg Heiler and Aaron Culich, created a template for making LLMs easily accessible to researchers - including advanced document RAG!
Events
- RSE Special Interest Group meeting 15. and 16. September - at Potsdam-Institut für Klimafolgenforschung. More info (DE).
- European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI) CI/CD hackathon - 2 Oct 2025, Copenhagen. More info.
- US RSE ‘Code, Practices, and People’ – October 6-8, Philadelphia, USA The third annual conference from the United States Research Software Engineer Association (US-RSE), to be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 6-8, 2025. More info on the conference.
- 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 info.
- 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).
Further Training Opportunities
HIDA Training courses
There are lots of courses available to you for free from Helmholtz Information & Data Science Academy (HIDA) including:
· First Steps in Python (Sep 1–3, 2025)
· Six Main Tasks in Image Processing (Sep 4 – Oct 16, 2025)
· Introduction to Deep Learning (Sep 8–10, 2025)
· Introduction to Git and GitLab (Sep 15–16, 2025)
· Overview of AI's Parallelization Methods in Supercomputers (Sep 16–17, 2025)
· Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) (Sep 17–19, 2025)
· Introduction to Statistics (Sep 18–26, 2025)
· Kickstart Shell & Git (Sep 22–23, 2025)
· A Practical Guide to Dimensionality Reduction (Sep 23, 2025)
and many more so check out what's available.
From the Digital Research Academy:
Training at FZJ:
- JUNIQ/EPIQ Summer School on Quantum Computing 2025
Date: 1-5 September 2025, 09:00-17:00
Abstract: https://go.fzj.de/2025-juniq-epiq-summer-school
Registration: https://events.hifis.net/event/2616/
- In-Situ Visualization on High-Performance-Computers (training course, online)
Time: 9-10 September 2025, 09:00-13:00 each day
Abstract: https://go.fzj.de/2025-in-situ-hpc
Registration until 2 September 2025: https://indico3-jsc.fz-juelich.de/event/239/
- Bringing Deep Learning Workloads to JSC supercomputers (training course, online, 3rd run)
Time: 16-17 September 2025, 13:00-17:00 each day
Abstract: https://go.fzj.de/2025-ai-sc-3
Registration until 9 September 2025: https://indico3-jsc.fz-juelich.de/event/240/
- Virtual Worlds for Machine Learning (training course, online)
Time: 23-24 September 2025, 09:00-12:00, 13:00-16:00 each day
Abstract: https://go.fzj.de/2025-virtual-worlds-ml
Registration until 16 September 2025: https://indico3-jsc.fz-juelich.de/event/234/
- 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
Abstract: https://go.fzj.de/2025-parallel-io
Registration until 20 October 2025: https://indico3-jsc.fz-juelich.de/event/244/
- 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
Abstract: https://go.fzj.de/2025-hpc-cplusplus
Registration until 20 October 2025: https://indico3-jsc.fz-juelich.de/event/250
- Directive-based GPU programming with OpenACC (training course, online)
Dates: 28-30 October 2025, 09:00-13:00 each day
Abstract: https://go.fzj.de/2025-gpu-openacc
Registration until 21 October 2025: https://indico3-jsc.fz-juelich.de/event/249/
- Introduction to Supercomputing at JSC - Theory & Practice (training course, online)
Dates: 10-13 November 2025, 13:00-17:00 each day
Abstract: https://go.fzj.de/2025-supercomputing-2
Registration until 3 November 2025: https://indico3-jsc.fz-juelich.de/event/252