Following the success of the 2024 call for proposals the RSE team in Sheffield put a call out a second call for proposals earlier this year. The call was open to all researchers across the university and successful applicants would receive dedicated support from an RSE Team member for upto 50% FTE for a period of six months.

Here we review the work undertaken on the projects we supported last year and introduce the successful applications in the 2025 round.

A few weeks ago, the Research Software Engineering (RSE) community gathered at the University of Warwick for RSECon25 (9–11 September 2025). The conference brought together hundreds of RSEs, researchers, and collaborators to share their work on software, best practices, exchange ideas, and build the future of research software.

From left to right: Yuliang Weng, Martin Dyer, Daniel Brady, Michael Foster, Romain Thomas, Peter Heywood, Shaun Donnelly, Erika Siregar (PhD from the information School), Christopher Wild, Gemma Ives, Tamora James, Edwin Brown, Neil Shephard, Farhad Allian, Robert Chisholm,Matthew Leach, Joe Heffer, Twin Karmakharm, Paul Richmond

The University of Sheffield RSEs played a major role in this year’s event — not only as a Silver Sponsor, but also through leadership positions, presentations, posters, workshops, and volunteering. Our team’s involvement demonstrates Sheffield’s strong commitment to the RSE community.

Several Sheffield RSEs took on key leadership roles in shaping RSECon25:

• Twin Karmakharm – Steering Committee Chair
• Romain Thomas – Programme Co-chair
• Robert Chisholm – Logistics Co-chair
• Neil Shephard – Publicity Chair

These roles highlight the influence and responsibility our team have in driving the direction and success of the national RSE conference.

In addition, Sheffield’s RSE team was present across the programme, with contributions spanning talks, posters, walkthroughs, and workshops:

• Talks & Walkthrough:
  • Matthew Leach – AMD GPUs for Scientific Computing
  • Shaun Donnelly & Edwin Brown – How to talk to your documents: An introduction to using natural language to query documents with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
  • Romain Thomas & Neil Shephard – Running a local RSE call for proposals
• Workshops:
  • Robert Chisholm & Peter Heywood – Reasonable Performance Computing SIG (SIG-RPC): Help Identify and Document Performance Traps in Research Software
• Posters:
  • Tamora James & Romain Thomas - FAIR2 for research software: developing a FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) and reproducible research software training programme
  • Edwin Brown - AutoEmulate:  Python library for automatically creating accurate and efficient emulators of complex simulations
  • Dan Brady - Leveraging GitHub API Data to Evaluate Git and GitHub Training Outcomes
  • Martin Dyer - Developing the GOTO Telescope Control System

This broad and diverse participation reflects the strength of our team across technical expertise, training, and community support.

Sheffield colleagues also supported the smooth running of the conference through volunteering (Daniel Brady & Michael Foster) and session chairing (Paul Richmond & Joe Heffer from the DAS team).

Looking towards RSECon26

We are excited to announce that the University of Sheffield will host RSECon26 in 2026 at the wave (9-11th September), which will also be co-located with the first International Research Software Conference (IRSC) (7-8th September). Building on our contributions at Warwick, we look forward to welcoming the RSE community to Sheffield next year for another vibrant and impactful conference. Romain Thomas and Twin Karmakharm will be leading the conference as programme chairs.

• Credit Photo: RSE Society

Earlier this year the RSE team in Sheffield put a call out for proposals for researchers in the University of Sheffield to collaborate with the RSE team. The successful applicants would receive dedicated support from an RSE Team member at 50% FTE for a period of six months.

This article introduces virtualenvwrapper for creating and working with Python Virtual Environments showing how to install and use it and highlighting some useful features.

We’ve finally put all the videos, slides and other resources together from the Best Practices in AI Afternoon event that happened on the 5th of July 2024. You can find them listed below.

Upgrading R to at least version 4.4.0

Due to a security vulnerability, all users are advised to update their installation of R to version 4.4.0 or newer as soon as possible (ideally within the next month).

GH200 GPUs now available in N8 CIR Bede

Members of the University of Sheffield have access to a range of GPU resources for carrying out their research, available in local (Tier 3) and affiliated regional (Tier 2) HPC systems.

As of March 2024, the N8 CIR Bede Tier 2 HPC facility now includes an Open Pilot of 3 NVIDIA GH200 Nodes which are available to all users.

Each GH200 node in Bede contains a single NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip - a 72 core NVIDIA Grace ARM CPU connected to a single NVIDIA Hopper GPU via a 900GB/s NVIDIA NVLink-C2C interconnect. This new interconnect allows data to be moved between the host and device with a much higher bandwidth than in traditional PCI-e based systems, reducing the time spent transferring data.

The RSE Team are pleased to announce four scheduled sessions of the ever popular Git & GitHub through GitKraken - Zero to Hero!. These courses will run in-person over two consecutive days in morning sessions from 09:30 to 13:00 on the following days.

• Monday 18th/Tuesday 19th March 2024
• Monday 22nd/Tuesday 23rd April 2024
• Monday 20th/Tuesday 21st May 2024
• Monday 24th/Tuesday 25th June 2024

What are Git, GitHub and GitKraken?

Git is a system of version controlling your code. Think of it as a lab-book or doctors notes that are taken as you progress through your work, recording conditions, saving what has worked and correcting what doesn’t.

GitHub is a website that allows people to work collaboratively on version controlled code.

GitKraken is a client for working with Git and GitHub that includes both a GUI (Graphical User Interface) and a CLI (Command Line Interface)

Who is the course for?

Everyone who writes code! If you write scripts to analyse your code in R, Stata or Matlab you would benefit from using Git to version control your code and GitHub to share your code and make it open. If you write Python, JavaScript, C/++ code as part of a team in your research group you would benefit from using Git and GitHub to work together.

Getting started with these tools can be overwhelming but by taking this course you will be introduced to the concepts behind them and how to use them effectively to not just version control your own work but work with others on the same code.

The course material is available online if you want to take a peek and the first half using Git and publishing web-pages can be worked through in your own time. The real benefit comes from participating in the collaborative exercises in the second half where you work together on projects making Pull Requests and resolving problems that arise.

If you’ve never used Git, GitHub or GitKraken or have only just started then sign-up and come and learn more about these powerful tools.

Pytest is an excellent framework for writing tests in Python. One of the neat features it includes is the ability to parameterise your tests which means you can write one test and pass different sets of parameters into it to test the range of actions that the function/method are meant to handle.

I’ve written before about Python Packaging and pre-commit which I’m a big fan of. Today I discovered a really useful tool for checking your packaging configuration and pre-commit configuration from the Scientific Python Development Guide.