What is the ITSR RSE team?

ITS Research has a Research Software Engineering team. This post introduces the team and how it supports research in Queen Mary University of London. You can also see how to contact the team and why you may want to.

The RSE team in ITS Research has a (small) number of research software engineers. Our aim is to support research students and staff across the university in creating, modifying and using research software.

We currently have a primary interest in research software for HPC with particular focus on Fortran and MPI applications. However, we've broader experience with C, C++, R, Python and Matlab and other forms of parallelisation paradigms.

The RSE team supports researchers in the university by assisting the Applications team with tickets in the ITSR help desk system. We're users of Apocrita and the Tier 2 systems, too, and this allows us act as "translators" between end users and systems administrators.

We also help research projects by offering code review services and profiling code and looking at optimizations. We're also keen to spread "good practice" to writers of research software, whether that software is to be used "for a quick job" or for further publication as part of a scientific output or a tool for the wider research community.

The research software engineers can be contacted by the usual email enquiry route, but we also sit in the #programming channel of the Slack workspace. Please ask us if you'd like to learn more about the team, research software engineering, or if there's a project you'd like us to look at.

In the RSE category we'll be posting a variety of short material, mostly based on those interesting things which appear during the course of working with research software.