Researcher's Time Has Value, Too
..And Researchers Value Their Time (Note: This post is adapted from #102 of the Research Computing Teams Newsletter) If you followed HPC twitter in late 2021 at all, you will have seen a heartfelt thread by a well-known research software developer, one who was a key contributor to the Singularity project among others, lamenting the frankly appalling state of developer productivity in HPC - both in what tools exist, and support for them (and other tools for developers) at academic centres. A lot of people...
Continue...To Compete, Your Team Needs a Specialty
And ‘HPC’ or ‘Research Software Development’ isn’t a specialty (Note: This post is adapted from #90 of the Research Computing Teams Newsletter) Quick: what’s your team’s specialty? Your team’s specialty is its reputation for what it’s good at. Not what you think your team is good at; what matters is what specific thing your stakeholders (funders, clients, institutional decision makers) think your specialty is. What they recommend you for to peers, what they recommend funding you for to decision makers. In the post-pandemic world, researchers...
Continue...Research Computing Funding Should Mostly Just Go To Researchers
Research computing and data — supporting research efforts with software, computer and data expertise and resources — is fundamentally all of a piece. Today there’s fewer and fewer hard boundaries between where the system requirements end and where the software or data resource requirements begin; and teams supporting researchers must have expertise across the stack. This convergence is a huge opportunity for research computing, but it’s also a challenge for funders. How to know how much to allocate to software, and how much to hardware?...
Continue...Nobody Else Cares About Your Tech Stack
Focus on your researchers’ and funders’ problems, not your technical solution (Note: This post is adapted from #75 of the Research Computing Teams Newsletter) Many of us who are managing research computing and data teams come up through the ranks doing research ourselves, and have experience in grantwriting for open research calls. That can actually hold us back from succeeding with getting grants for “digital research infrastructure” — building teams and infrastructure to support research. The thing is, digital research infrastructure calls, the sort that...
Continue...When Research Infrastructure Is and Isn't Maintained
(Note: This post is adapted from #53 of the Research Computing Teams Newsletter) There were two big stories in the news this week (as I write this, at the end of 2020) about what’s possible with sustained research infrastructure funding and what happens when research infrastructure isn’t sustained. In the first, you’ve probably read about AlphaFold, Google Brain’s efforts to bring deep learning to protein folding. It did very well in the 14th annual Critical Assessment of (protein) Structure Prediction (CASP) contest. Predictably but unfortunately,...
Continue...Buckle up, CPUs are going to get weirder
The M1 is a good test run, let’s get ready (Note: This post is adapted from last week’s issue 51 of the resarch computing teams newsletter) The big news of the past month has been Apple’s new M1 CPU. The M1’s specs in and of themselves kind of interesting, but more important to us in research computing is that the M1 is an example of how CPUs are going to get more different as time goes on, and that will have impacts on our teams....
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