Conference Summary

Research Software Engineering (RSE) Sheffield, the Sheffield Bioinformatics Core and the Sheffield R User Group are organising a series in of hackathons during October as part of Hacktoberfest 2019, a global initiative to encourage participation in open-source software projects. Hacktoberfest is all about encouraging meaningful contributions to the open-source ecosystem and Hacktoberfest meetups are for beginners and veterans alike!

We recently hired two more Research Software Engineers (RSEs) (including Bob Turner, who started last week) but are already looking for another teammate!

The RSE team has a recurring interest in learning Python: Because we take on new staff and we want to train them, because we want to enhance the skills of our existing staff, because we deliver training courses, and because we are often asked for our advice on how others should learn Python.

Today I helped a researcher with an interesting problem. He had workflow that generated the desired number of output files when run interactively on our ShARC HPC system but returned fewer output files when run as a (Grid Engine) batch job.

Here in the Dept of Computer Science (DCS) at the University of Sheffield the need for access to high-performance GPU hardware has increased considerably in the last couple of years. Within the dept uses currently include machine/deep learning and agent-based modelling (e.g. using FLAME GPU).

2019 is another good year for representation of the University of Sheffield and RSE Sheffield in the Software Sustainability Institute’s (SSI) Fellowship program, with Dr Mozhgan Kabiri Chimeh and Dr Anna Krystalli, both members of the RSE team, joining a cohort of 17 Fellows from around the country and across disciplines. This follows another successful year in 2018, when the University of Sheffield was represented by three Fellows, Dr Tania Allard, a member of the RSE team at the time, Dr Adam Tomkins, a neuroinformatic researcher on the Digital Fruit Fly Brain project and Becky Arnold, a PhD student in Astrophysics. Becky went on to spend 4 months with the RSE team, working with Anna on the Turing Way project, an open source how-to guide for reproducible data science.

Following on from my previous post about us recruiting for a new member of the RSE Sheffield team to work on a variety of projects, we’re also recruiting for another new RSE role for a specific project, PRIMAGE.

We are looking for a new member of the growing Research Software Engineering (RSE) team here at the University of Sheffield. We’d love to hear from you if:

The 10th International Women in HPC workshop will discuss methods to improve diversity and provide early career women with the opportunity to develop their professional skills and profile. It is to be held as part of the ISC (International Supercomputing) 2019 conference on Thursday June 20th 2019 in Frankfurt, Germany.