It takes more than a village to raise good research software
David E. Bernholdt, Lois Curfman McInnes, Michael A. Heroux (IDEAS Productivity Project) • September 6, 2018
Software has been both ubiquitous and largely neglected in computational science and engineering (CSE) since before the field became a recognized entity. The interest in CSE software for both practitioners and sponsors has primarily been on the scientific insights and advances it enables rather than on its value as a long-lived tool or product. As a result, the culture of CSE, broadly speaking, has a structure and reward system that focuses on the algorithms and the results, but where good quality research software, as well as the time and effort required to produce it, often tend to be marginalized.
Report from the first URSSI workshop
Karthik Ram, Daniel S. Katz, Jeffrey Carver, Nic Weber, and Sandra Gesing • August 23, 2018
Among the many efforts that are underway as part of NSF’s SI2 program, one of the most cross-cutting efforts is the planning for a US Research Software Institute (URSSI), which was funded in December 2017. This effort aims to plan an institute that would address challenges around making research software sustainable and robust, and more importantly, improve the sustainability of the researchers who develop such software. Some of our initial discussions, described in detail below, have surfaced problems encountered by specific researchers working on specific software applications, but the solutions conceived of and planned for by URSSI are not aimed at any one domain or discipline of research.
Learning and Working Together: Research Software Organizations Around the World
Scott Henwood | Director, Research Software, CANARIE • August 6, 2018
Note: This is reposted from the CANARIE Blog My previous blog posts have focused on the research software landscape in Canada, but the challenges and opportunities we face are not different from those in other parts of the world. In this post, I provide a brief overview of three international organizations that CANARIE works with as part of our Research Software program. These organizations are very different in their structure and approach to excellence in research software, but as you’ll see, they are all trying to solve common problems.
Results from a US survey about Research Software Engineers
Daniel S. Katz, Sandra Gesing, Olivier Philippe, and Simon Hettrick • June 21, 2018
In 2016, the UK Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) ran a first survey of Research Software Engineers (RSEs): the people who write code in academia. This produced the first insight into the demographics, job satisfaction, and practices of RSEs. To support and broaden this work, the Institute planned to run the survey every year in the UK and an ever-expanding number of countries so that insight and comparison can be made across the globe.
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