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The Craftsperson

& The Scholar

James Hetherington

The State of Research Software {.chapter-title}

The SIRO Problem {.diagram2}

PhDWare

  • Don't look if anyone's done it before
  • Code till it works
  • Generate a figure
  • Throw it away

Labware

  • Understood by one genius
  • Implements great science, now
  • FORTRAN in any language
  • Code not engineered for readability
  • Can't add new science

ConsultantWare

  • Little understanding of the science
  • Overengineered
  • Unmaintainable by the research group

Middleware

  • Generalise a part of the research problem
  • Publish at an eScience conference
  • Have no users in the research community

HPCWare

  • Get a 5% improvement in performance
  • On a particular architecture
  • Publish a scaling graph
  • Selection against:
    • Readability
    • Maintainability
    • Adaptability

Research Software Engineers {.chapter-title}

The Craftsperson And The Scholar {.diagram2}

Research Software Engineers {.poster #dilstein}

Research Software Engineers

  • Not independent researchers
    • No personal research agenda
  • Facilitative, supportive, and collaborative
    • Part of the academic community
    • Deep engagement with research groups

Why it works

  • People want to be RSEs
  • We have been hiding as:
    • RAs who program too much
    • HPC or research group sysadmins

The movement

  • We need a name and some status!

  • Measure and incentivise RSEs correctly
  • Integrate RSEs within HEIs
  • Support institutional innovation

Our story

  • 2010: Software Sustainability Institute Founded
  • April 2012: Idea and name at SSI Collaborations Workshop
  • September 2012: UCL Group founded
  • 2013: UKRSE Assocation founded
  • 2013: Times Higher Education article article

Our story

  • 2014: Manchester group
  • 2015: Southampton and Cambridge Groups
  • Jan 2016: EPSRC awards first Research Software Engineering Fellowships
  • 2016: Bristol, Sheffield Groups
  • September 2016: First RSE conference, 202 attendees, 14 countries

Our story

  • RSE Germany and RSE Netherlands founded
  • 2017: Leicester, Imperial College groups.
  • September 2017: Second conference, 224 attendees, 12 countries
  • Late 2017: UKRSE formally incorporated as a charity
  • Late 2017: Second round of UK RSE fellows appointed
  • October 2017: Australia and New Zealand RSE founded

RSE Groups {.chapter-title}

RSE Group

  • Shared home for RSEs in an institution
  • Both academic and Support
  • "Science as a Service"

Activities

  • Projects
  • Consulting
  • Training
  • Infrastructure

Domain

  • From HPC codes to analysis scripts and infrastructure code
  • From theoretical physics to digital humanities

UCL Model

  • All roles "permanent"
  • But funded from research grant income on a pooled basis

The UCL Research Software Group

  • Helped UCL researchers win over £2M
  • Grown through grant funding
  • From archaeology to astrophysics

Readable, reliable, and reproducible

We help make code:

  • Last beyond the end of the grant that funded it
  • Be usable by someone other than the PhD student who wrote it
  • Have a standard of correctness better than "the graph looks about right"

Why work with RSEs? {.chapter-title}

Clean code makes performance possible

LikeLTD

Structural work:

  • Broken down into functions
  • Separate objective function from home-made optimiser
  • Use standard optimiser libraries

Clean code makes performance possible

LikeLTD

Performance improvements:

  • 4 times from moving to C
  • 8 times from parallelisation
  • 10 times from change of optimisation algorithm
  • 300 times total

Engineering helps legacy code live

DCProgs
Before: * Venerable Fortran * Hasn't compiled since 2006 * Underpins Nature published research

Engineering helps legacy code live

DCProgs
Our solution: * Old code as "test oracle" * Reimplemented in C++ and Python * Use algorithm libraries
Since then: * ARCHER parallelisation * MCMC inference

Reliability unlocks science

HemeLB Setup Tool
* Voxelisation for Lattice Boltzman * Crashed 1 time in 20 * So tweak the origin!

Reliability unlocks science

HemeLB Setup Tool
* Replace with standard comp geometry library * Can handle all geometries instead of 19 in 20 * Means can model changing geometries

Good, huh? {.chapter-title}

Lessons learned

Well, it hasn't always been pretty.

I'll try to indicate some tips and tricks learned while creating a generalist science-as-a-service software group.

Some of these we got right. Some are things I wish I'd known at the beginning.

Sell performance, deliver reproducibility {#flymac .poster}

Sell performance

Deliver reproducibility

Use appropriate technology {#windvane .poster}

Use appropriate technology

Look beyond the usual {#ancient .poster}

Look beyond the usual

Make space to learn {#crafty .poster}

Make space to learn

Organisational Judo {#judo .poster}

Organisational

Judo

Computational Science as a Service {#it-crowd .poster}

Computational Science as a Service

RSEs and Teaching {.chapter-title}

Software Carpentry

* Intensive "bootcamp" * Automation * Version control * Unit testing * Databases
> I found the command line intimidating at first, but after a while it felt > like I was inside my computer. > -- A student at a UCL software carpentry event

RITS's training programme

  • Software carpentry
  • Data carpentry
  • Introductory Python for Data Analysis
  • Research Software Engineering with Python
  • Research Computing with C++
  • High Performance and High Throughput Computing

Digitally native learning tools

  • Web-first but classroom- and kindle-ready
    • Single source, multiple formats
  • Examples which work:
    • Generated lecture notes from code that is executed and complete
  • Open and collaborative
    • CC-BY license on notes
    • Massive cross-institutional co-creation

Active classrooms

  • Practicals and concepts together
  • Bring your own device
  • Post-it-notes and etherpads

The syllabus is full.

  • Ideally, everyone would know everything!
  • This is clearly impossible
  • So we need division of labour
  • and enough training to work together

Unicorn Farming {.poster #unicorn}

Multi- professionalism {.chapter-title}

Multiprofessional

RSE combines:

  • Researcher
  • Coder

Team Research

  • RSE
  • Data Scientist
  • Visualisation
  • Interaction
  • ...

The Turing Institute {.poster}

  • UK's national institute for data science
  • Joint venture of 5 UK universities
  • Shared Faculty

Research Engineering at the Turing Institute

  • Shared research staff pool
    • RSEs
    • Data Scientists

To finish {.chapter-title}

Beyond the Postdoc {.poster}

The Sith approach

to professional continuity

Why you should have one

  • More and more research uses software
  • General programmers can't understand research
  • Postdocs and PhD students don't have time to make reliable code

Why you should be one

  • Write papers
  • Make code

This talk

  • http://bit.ly/rse-talk-17
  • https://github.com/UCL/rsd-talks [CC-BY]

Acknowledgements

  • Neil Chue Hong, Simon Hettrick
  • Susan Morrell and her team
  • Alys Brett, Chris Woods
  • Tom Couch
  • Mayeul d'Avezac, Jens Nielsen
  • Raquel Alegre, Jonathan Cooper, David Perez-Suarez
  • James Geddes, Martin O'Reilly