Research Software Engineering
The Research Technology Platform in Scientific Computing provides support for software development through the Research Software Engineering (RSE) team. The aim of RSE is to provide both a general training, support and consultancy service for our users, and also to supply a reservoir of expertise that can be made available to funded projects on an FTE basis. RSE support is paid for through grant income, but many of our services are available for free to any University of Warwick researcher. Research groups that make use of RSE training are asked to add costs to grant applications as detailed on the funding page to cover the cost of providing training.
RSE Standard Training
RSE training provides a set of "off the shelf" courses and resources to help your group get started with research computing, make the most of the hardware platforms made available through the RTP, and gain useful software development skills. The training list is always expanding, but generally includes the following :
- Curated list of available external resources, with support to help identify the resources you need.
- Introduction to SCRTP resources
- Getting access and using facilities
- Basic use of Linux
- Basic concepts in programming
- Software development skills
- Version control
- Debugging
- Testing
- Build tools
- Documentation
- Software design methodology
- Parallel and high performance software development
- Choosing parallel strategies
- Programming with common libraries or toolchains
- Developing programming skills in common languages
- C++
- Fortran
- Python
- Using HPC facilities
RSE training is currently partly funded by the HPC Midlands Plus grant, and provides support on porting code to this machine.
RSE Custom Training
The RSE group can also provide custom training for your research group or DTC. Please contact us to discuss your training needs.
RSE Software/Development Support
As well as providing training, the RSE group operates a support forum here where people can post problems that they're having with specific pieces of software, or with challenges in software development. The RSE group staff try to respond to any posts there as soon as possible, so if you have a problem do please post it there and we will try to get back to you as soon as possible. Equally, if you have a solution to someone else's problem then do please post it.
RSE Drop In Sessions
To provide more hands on support for groups that do not need seconded RSE time, Research Computing offer a drop-in support session. The aim of this is to bring together researchers who write software and members of various RSE teams in an informal setting. For details, times and locations see the drop-in landing page.
RSE Consultancy
The RSE group also provides limited consultancy support and tailored advice. This includes
- Language and library selection
- Software design support
- Assistance with selection of hardware
- HPC access assistance
- Which HPC resources are available and suit your needs
- How to apply for HPC time
- How to prepare the documentation needed for access to Tier 0, 1 and 2 HPC facilities.
This support is not a substitute for seconded RSE time, and does not involve an RSE working on your code.
Seconded RSE
We also offer a service where a fraction of one or more RSE staff is funded by your grant income, and work on a project that has been designed by you with input from the RSE group. Any project that needs extensive software development would be suitable for seconded RSE support, but examples include
- Extension of existing software with new features
- Modernisation/redesign of existing software
- Scaling-up or optimisation of existing software to utilise high performance computing
- Modification of software to run on novel architectures
- Developing new software packages (usually as part of a development team working with domain specialists)
If you have a project that you feel would benefit from having a seconded RSE developer working on it, then please contact the RSE team before applying for funding for the project so that we can assist in writing the grant application, and to make sure that we have (or can acquire) the necessary resources.
External RSE Consultancy
We also offer consultancy in High Performance Computing and Technical Software Development via the University of Warwick's Scientific Services platform. Details of this can be found here (software development and here (HPC)