Third conference of Research Software Engineers
This year saw the Third Conference of Research Software Engineers (RSEs). It was held at the University of
Brimingham on the 3rd and 4th of September. The conference was sold out with an
attendance of 314 delegates from twelve countries. The majority of the
delegates were from the UK representing a mix of academic institutions and
companies. As previously the format was two days with keynote talks and
parallel tracks of talks and workshops. This year there was an exhibition hall
where the sponsors had stands.
Day 1
The conference programme kicked off with two keynote talks. The first was
from Eleanor Robson of UCL, titled "Nammu and Oracc: Digital Humanities
Software in the Sustainable Development of Iraqi History and Heritage". This
was interesting in that the humanities are often underrepresented in these
sorts of events. Eleanor who is an expert in cuneiform writing described the
evolution of their Nammu editor,
the open corpus of cuneiform Oracc, and the benefits of working with
the RSE group at UCL.
The next keynote was by Andrew Fitzgibbon of Microsoft
Research, one of the sponsors, titled "Building Computer Vision Systems That
Really Work". Andy is an entertaining speaker and has a long CV of interesting
research that lead to products such as the Kinect and Hololens. Unfortunately he didn't have
time to finish all of his talk, if the end was as good as the bits we did see,
we would have been in for a treat (as he would say).
After lunch the conference split in to parallel sessions. I went to the one
with the theme of software engineering. Tobias Schlauch from DLR followed up a
talk from last year with "Software Engineering Guidelines – From Theory to
Practice". The guidelines (in English) are found at
http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1344612. These provide checklists for evaluating
the maturity of a software project and guidance on which to apply depending on
the scale and distribution of the software. One comment from the audience is
that a similar/complementary set of guidelines are NASA's Reuse Readiness
Levels .
Benjamin Mort from Oxford's OERC spoke on
"SIP: Prototyping the Science Data Processing for the Worlds Largest Radio
Telescope" the telescope is of course the Square Kilometer Array. Benjamin's talk interested me from an
architecture point of view and when the slides are available I would like to
take a closer look. For continuous integration (CI) they are using Travis. All
the info can be found in the SKA book. Dominik Jochym from STFC talked about
CASTEP in "A (Long) Tale of Academic Software Development ". The name
initially stood for Cambridge Serial Total Energy Package, it is apparently
"none of those things now". For CI, after six years of experience with BuildBot
they have moved to an external (to the CASTEP group) service called ANVIL built on Jenkins. The final talk in
the session was Alex Meakins from UK AEA on "Modernising Data Access for the
JET Tokamak". The JET data is in a
proprietry in-house data format. This work is for an abstraction layer that
looks a bit like HDF5 and allows them to change the underlying format without
disturbing the consumers of the data.
The next session provided a dilemma
with three of my Bristol RSE colleagues presenting workshops at the same time.
Christopher Woods and Leter Hedges presented "Building and Deploying Custom
JupyterHub Images Using Docker and Kubernetes to Run Workshops in the Cloud"
and Matt Williams "Make Testing Easy with pytest". In order to avoid playing
favourites I went to neither and instead attended the workshop by Jim Cownie on "Getting More Python
Performance with Intel Optimized Distribution for Python". There were
notebooks provided on the conference virtual machine image to work through that
showed simply replacing the standard python with the free (as in beer) Intel
one you can get a 47 times speedup on some problems.
Earlier in the day Christopher Woods had announced the work on the
formation of the Society of Research Software Engineering which will place the
organisation on a better footing as a charitable organisation independent of
any particular university's procurement policies. At the end of the second day
we had the last of the informal AGM's under the association's old structure.
This was followed by a feedback and requirements gathering exercise for what
the members.
Afterwards was the conference dinner.
The University of Bristol research software engineers we well represented at the conference , here are most of us at the dinner. Not pictured Chris Edsall. (Photo: Christopher Woods)
Bonus Day 3: Tier 2 RSE Meeting
A couple of communities took the opportunity of having a large number of
RSEs in the one place at the same time to hold add-on meetings. One of these
was the Citation Format Hack Day, the other, which I attended, was the Tier 2 /
Regional HPC Workshop. The programme was organised by James Grant who is the
RSE at the University of Bath who is associated with the GW4 Tier 2 system
Isambard. (For those unfamiliar with the tier-n nomenclature, the Branscomb
pyramid defines tier-0 as pan-national services, tier-1 as national resources
like ARCHER, and tier-2 as regional level services.)
Andy Turner (associated with Cirrus as well as EPCC) described the effort to
get reproducible benchmarks on HPC systems. The repos is at
https://github.com/hpc-uk/archer-benchmarks (the build instructions aren't
included but can be found at https://github.com/hpc-uk/build-instructions).
Jon Gibson from NAG told us about the POP Centre of Excellence who provide
performance optimisation service for free. This was funded by the EU under the
Horizons 2020 program. While the original funding has ended there will be a new
funding round for three more years 2018 - 2021.
Mark Dawson who leads the RSE group at Swansea gave an overview of
Supercomputing Wales - Uwchgyfrifiadura Cymru (a follow-on to the HPC Wales
project) with a focus on the RSEs spread througout the country. They have now
filled all thirteen posts.
James Grant gave a review of the Isambard
hackathons and documentation that have taken place so far. Since I have been
involved in all of these there wasn't much news for me, but the approach might
be of interest to other tier-2 sites that want to develop closer links amongst
their RSEs. Phil Ridley from ARM gave a talk with hints and tips on porting to
the ARM architecture. This was good for me to see as I unavoidably had to miss
it when he gave the same talk in Bath six weeks ago.
Alan Simpson who ran the ARCHER Champions program facilitated a session with
a presentation about how that was run. Now that the funding has run out he is
looking to see how the community would like to take the program forward,
perhaps expanding it to "HPC Champions", he is not wedded to the name, we could
call it anything. He wants it to be as inclusive as possible. If you have an
interest in HPC you can join. During the session he made use of Slido which he
had seen used earlier in the conference to solicit instant online feedback from
the group.
For the rest of the afternoon we split in to groups to discuss
the proposed topics and feed back to a plenary session. I chaired a group
discussing inclusivity.
A small number of us joined the other workshop for a "networking session" at
the university staff club.
Summary
- Research Software Engineering is a large and growing profession not just in
the UK but also across the world.
- The RSE conference is a valuable opportunity to build community, network and
learn new techniques.
- The University of Bristol should continue to support the involvement of it's
RSEs in organising, volunteering and presenting at and attending the
conference.
[ This blog post will be updated when the slides are available. ]