All members of the University are entitled to download and use the NAG Fortran Compiler under the terms of our site license.

Many people who use Maple on Sheffield’s High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster do so interactively. They connect to the system, start a graphical X-Windows session and use Maple in exactly the same way as they would use it on their laptop. Such usage does have some benefits: giving access to more CPU cores and memory than you’d get on even the most highly specified of laptops, for example.

How I solved a mystery with strace and bash

A new position is available as a Research Associate/Research Software Engineer in the area of complex systems modelling using emerging high performance parallel architectures.

I attended the Software Sustainability Institute’s Collaborations Workshop last month. This annual workshop is one of the primary events in the Research Software Engineering calendar and I highly recommend going to one if you are involved in the development of research software in any way.

The big news from Microsoft is that, from this summer, Windows 10 will support user-mode programs from the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution.

We ran a ‘Code Cafe’ event for Coffee Revolution for Researchers who wanted to take their first steps with R. Details and class materials are at http://www.walkingrandomly.com/?p=5981

Last week (11-15th January 2016) saw the first Open Astronomy workshop held at The University of Sheffield for the UK astronomy and solar physics communities. The first two days of the workshop consisted of the core syllabus of Software Carpentry, covering git, bash and an introduction to programming with Python. The last three days provided an introduction to carrying out research in astronomy using Python. The attendees were mostly PhD students in Astrophysics from the University of Sheffield, however there were also representation of other fields (mathematics, medicine, ecology), from other universities (St. Andrews, Reading) and at different stages in their careers (post-docs).