Welcome to the November 2025 newsletter for the research software community at The University of Sheffield, featuring news, opportunities, events and training for you.
The full applications to the Research Software Maintenance Fund - Round 1 have been reviewed and the Software Sustainability Institute have written a summary of reviewing the 143 proposals submitted. Its worth reading in full, but of particular note is this observation…
Finally, despite encouraging RTPs to apply as leads, most of the applications recommended for funding were led by academic researchers. In one of the three awards led by an RTP in practice, the application had to be submitted with an academic as the lead (but with no resources requested, and with a clear indication in the application that the real lead was the RTP). This exemplifies the difficulties and inequalities that can be faced by RTPs in leading applications.
The DRPS community is a group for people that support researchers in carrying out research in the digital age. Meetings are held monthly, with discussions around events, training and opportunities related to the field.
You can join the google group here to stay informed.
The next meeting is scheduled for 2pm on Wednesday 2025-11-05.
LunchBytes are short talks from the research community on research software, data, and infrastructure.
More information on future LunchBytes will be coming out over the coming months, so sign up to the RSE mailing list if you’d like to learn more about research software and associated practices, or get in contact with Norbert if you would like to share what you know at an upcoming session!
Why not come to a Code Clinic? We’re keen to help you.
Code Clinics are fortnightly supported sessions run by the RSE team and IT Services’ Research IT 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 Research IT teams will be available to review code, advise, troubleshoot, and suggest ways to improve your computational workflows.
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.
Alongside the HPC Drop-In sessions, Research IT 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.
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.
Research 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.
For queries relating to collaborating with the RSE team on projects: rse@sheffield.ac.uk
Information and access to 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.