June/July 2022 Newsletter

5 July 2022 01:00

The University of Sheffield Joint newsletter from RSE and Research IT for June / July 2022

Support

Code Clinics

Why not come to a Code Clinic? We’re keen to hear from you.

Code Clinics are fortnightly supported sessions run by the RSE team and IT Services’ Research and Innovation IT (ITS R&I) team. They are open to anyone at TUoS writing code for research to get help with programming problems and general advice on best practices.

At each session, members of the RSE and/or ITS R&I teams will be available to review code, advise, troubleshoot, and suggest ways to improve your computational workflows.

Research IT HPC Drop In

HPC Drop-In sessions are providing assistance with HPC related user issues such as challenges in scaling an application from desktop to supercomputer. We are considering extending the number of our sessions to two or three weekly. These interactive sessions could provide a better interface with our users than our non-interactive ticketing system. These sessions are advertised on the HPC mailing list.

Research IT Consultations

Alongside the HPC Drop-In sessions, we are also running one to one consultations to solve in depth user specific problems. These consultations can be booked via our webpage. If you are interested please visit the following link: https://students.sheffield.ac.uk/it-services/research/support.

LunchBytes: Workflow Managers

The next LunchBytes session is from 13:30 on the 21st July.

Scientific workflows (for example in bioinformatics) often require several different scripts or pieces of software to be run and their outputs fed into each other. Ideally, we’d like to be able to understand the provenance of the output, without having to re-run the entire workflow every time a minor change is made to code or data. This is often difficult to achieve with bash or Python scripts (for example), but workflow managers can help.

LunchBytes needs YOU!

LunchBytes are organised by and for the research software community at The University of Sheffield. If you’d like to curate a session on a topic or present something, get in touch by emailing lunchbytes-organisers-group@sheffield.ac.uk - Or suggest topics on the jamboard.

Research IT Forum

Research IT Forum is primarily to engage the research computing community and share research carried out in specific departments. We also use the Forum to signpost new HPC resources. Previous Fora included GPU accelerated and AI/Machine Learning research, image processing and analysing human language. The recordings are available for all attendees. The next Forum is targeted for October.

Events

  • DiveRSE talk series: Lessons from Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in open source software 16:00-17:00 5th July
  • CarpentryCon 2022 1-12th August - The Carpentries Community’s online conference, this year’s theme is expanding data frontiers.
  • RSECon22 6-8th September - The annual UK conference is hosted in Newcastle this year, registration for attendees closes 6th July!
  • Digital Humanities Congress 2022 8-10th September - This Sheffield conference aims to promote the sharing of knowledge, ideas and techniques within the digital humanities, registration for attendees closes 31st August.
  • OpenFest 2022 14-15th September - The University library is hosting this conference on the topic of open research practices.
  • GitKon 2022 11-13th October - GitKraken is hosting an online conference filled with sessions on everything important to Git users.
  • Computing Insight UK 2022 1-2nd December - A HPC focused conference in Manchester, this year’s key theme is Sustainable HPC, abstract submission closes 16th September.

News, Web & Blogs

Opportunities

Research IT news

A100 GPU nodes

Bessemer is now temporarily upgraded with 64 A100 GPUs. The resource is available for immediate use, however, it will be moved to Stanage (see below) in due course. For more information please visit https://docs.hpc.shef.ac.uk/en/latest/bessemer/GPUComputingBessemer.html#gpucomputing-bessemer.

Introduction of our new HPC facility, Stanage

Our new HPC facility, named Stanage, will allow access to ~12,000 cores and 64 GPU (A100). The facility will come online at the end of July/early August.

Training

Research IT is providing a place for beginners or advanced users to expand their knowledge of HPC and different programming languages. The courses are part of the Doctoral Development Programme. For more information please visit our training registration web page (via VPN): https://crs.shef.ac.uk.

Git & GitHub through GitKraken workshop - from Zero to Hero!

Visit the links below for more information. These events are now fully booked, but you can join the waiting list in case any spaces become available. If you sign up for a course, please make sure you either attend or cancel your booking. Bookings can usually be cancelled via eventbrite.

Sheffield RSE Team

The Sheffield RSE Team aims to collaborate with you to help improve your research software.

They can provide dedicated staff to ensure that you can deliver excellent research software engineering on your research projects.

The Sheffield RSE Team provides free Code Clinics (in collaboration with IT Services), plus paid services that allow us to collaborate longer term.

Research IT

The Research and Innovation Team within IT directly supports research, both academic and commercial. We provide large scale HPC systems, advice on everything from statistics to ML to data pipelines and training for both students and staff. Working with academics, our staff are embedded within research groups on both long and short term engagements.

Contact Us

For queries relating to collaborating with the RSE team on projects: rse@sheffield.ac.uk

Information and access to JADE II and Bede.

Join our mailing list so as to be notified when we advertise talks and workshops by subscribing to this Google Group.

Queries regarding free research computing support/guidance should be raised via our Code clinic or directed to the University IT helpdesk.