Mike Jackson's blog

The Software Sustainability Institute’s Collaborations Workshop 2015 (CW15) will be held from 25-27 March 2015 in Oxford, UK.

CW15 focuses on software, best practice and the social side of working past the boundaries of traditional disciplines and roles to accelerate research outcomes. Or, put differently, interdisciplinarity done right!

EPCC helped lead the way in creating the standardised Message-Passing Interface (MPI) programming system to enable faster, more powerful, problem solving using parallel computing. It is now the ubiquitous de-facto standard among both hardware and software vendors.

Mike Jackson and Dan Holmes explain how EPCC continues to be involved in its development and use.

In 2013, the DiRAC consortium rolled out the DiRAC driving licence, a software skills aptitude test for researchers wanting to use DiRAC's high-performance computing resources. Now ARCHER, the UK National Supercomputing Service, is to roll out an ARCHER driving test.

Despite their similar names, these tests differ in nature, intent, scale and reward. In this post, EPCC's Mike Jackson, Andrew Turner and Clair Barrass compare and contrast these two supercomputer tests. 

Last week EPCC's ARCHER training team ran another Software Carpentry workshop here in Edinburgh, on 3rd and 4th of December. The workshop provided attendees with an introduction to version control and Git, building programs with Python, automating tasks with Make, and how (and how much) to test programs. These were set within the context of best practices for scientific computing.

ARCHER, the UK's national supercomputing service, offers training in software development and high-performance computing to scientists and researchers across the UK. As part of our training service, we are running a two-day Software Carpentry workshop here at EPCC from 3-4 December.

ARCHER, the UK's national supercomputing service, offers training in software development and high-performance computing to scientists and researchers across the UK. As part of our training service EPCC is running a two-day Software Carpentry boot camp at Imperial College London, UK, on 16-17 September.

ARCHER, the UK's new national supercomputing service, offers training in software development and high-performance computing to scientists and researchers across the UK. As part of our training service EPCC is running a three-day Software Carpentry boot camp and Introduction to Scientific Programming in Python at Cranfield University, UK, on 21-23 July.

Mathematical modelling of complex fluid flows has practical application within many industrial sectors including energy, the environment and health. Flow modelling can include oil and gas flows in long-distance pipelines or refinery distillation columns, liquid cooling of micro-electronic devices, carbon capture and cleaning processes, water treatment plants, blood flows in arteries, and enzyme interactions. Multi-phase flow modelling models flows consisting of gases, fluids and solids within a single system eg steam and water, or oil and gas within a pipe, or coal dust in the air.

Michael Chappell leads the Quantitative Biomedical Inference (QuBIc) research group within the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Oxford. Michael has developed a method of processing functional magnetic resonance image (MRI) data that can be used to recognise blood flow patterns in the brain. I have been helping Michael through one of The Software Sustainability Institute's consultancy projects, which he applied for through the Institute's open call. Part of our collaboration looked at issues around integrating Subversion or Git repositories with CVS.

LabBook is a mobile app and online service that allows users to securely record and share their experiment notes. LabBook's developers - Mark Woodbridge, Geraint Barton and Derek Huntley of Imperial College London's Bioinformatics Support Service - asked The Software Sustainability Institute for consultancy as part of the Institute's open call.

I've been working with them to provide advice on the LabBook software, how it is developed, and how it can be moved towards an open source product.