10 research outputs found

    Addressing Research Software Sustainability via Institutes

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    Research software is essential to modern research, but it requires ongoing human effort to sustain: to continually adapt to changes in dependencies, to fix bugs, and to add new features. Software sustainability institutes, amongst others, develop, maintain, and disseminate best practices for research software sustainability, and build community around them. These practices can both reduce the amount of effort that is needed and create an environment where the effort is appreciated and rewarded. The UK SSI is such an institute, and the US URSSI and the Australian AuSSI are planning to become institutes, and this extended abstract discusses them and the strengths and weaknesses of this approach.Comment: accepted by ICSE 2021 BokSS Workshop (https://bokss.github.io/bokss2021/

    Community Organizations: Changing the Culture in Which Research Software Is Developed and Sustained

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    Software is the key crosscutting technology that enables advances in mathematics, computer science, and domain-specific science and engineering to achieve robust simulations and analysis for science, engineering, and other research fields. However, software itself has not traditionally received focused attention from research communities; rather, software has evolved organically and inconsistently, with its development largely as by-products of other initiatives. Moreover, challenges in scientific software are expanding due to disruptive changes in computer hardware, increasing scale and complexity of data, and demands for more complex simulations involving multiphysics, multiscale modeling and outer-loop analysis. In recent years, community members have established a range of grass-roots organizations and projects to address these growing technical and social challenges in software productivity, quality, reproducibility, and sustainability. This article provides an overview of such groups and discusses opportunities to leverage their synergistic activities while nurturing work toward emerging software ecosystems

    Research Software Engineering in 2030

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    This position paper for an invited talk on the "Future of eScience" discusses the Research Software Engineering Movement and where it might be in 2030. Because of the authors' experiences, it is aimed globally but with examples that focus on the United States and United Kingdom.Comment: Invited paper for 2023 IEEE Conference on eScienc

    The Global Impact of Science Gateways, Virtual Research Environments and Virtual Laboratories

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    Science gateways, virtual laboratories and virtual research environments are all terms used to refer to community-developed digital environments that are designed to meet a set of needs for a research community. Specifically, they refer to integrated access to research community resources including software, data, collaboration tools, workflows, instrumentation and high-performance computing, usually via Web and mobile applications. Science gateways, virtual laboratories and virtual research environments are enabling significant contributions to many research domains, facilitating more efficient, open, reproducible research in bold new ways. This paper explores the global impact achieved by the sum effects of these programs in increasing research impact, demonstrates their value in the broader digital landscape and discusses future opportunities. This is evidenced through examination of national and international programs in this field

    Towards computational reproducibility: researcher perspectives on the use and sharing of software

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    Research software, which includes both source code and executables used as part of the research process, presents a significant challenge for efforts aimed at ensuring reproducibility. In order to inform such efforts, we conducted a survey to better understand the characteristics of research software as well as how it is created, used, and shared by researchers. Based on the responses of 215 participants, representing a range of research disciplines, we found that researchers create, use, and share software in a wide variety of forms for a wide variety of purposes, including data collection, data analysis, data visualization, data cleaning and organization, and automation. More participants indicated that they use open source software than commercial software. While a relatively small number of programming languages (e.g., Python, R, JavaScript, C++, MATLAB) are used by a large number, there is a long tail of languages used by relatively few. Between-group comparisons revealed that significantly more participants from computer science write source code and create executables than participants from other disciplines. Differences between researchers from computer science and other disciplines related to the knowledge of best practices of software creation and sharing were not statistically significant. While many participants indicated that they draw a distinction between the sharing and preservation of software, related practices and perceptions were often not aligned with those of the broader scholarly communications community

    Conceptualizing a US Research Software Sustainability Institute

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    Modern research is inescapably digital, with data and publications most often created, analyzed, and stored electronically, using tools and methods expressed in software. This "research software" is essential to progress in science, engineering, and all other fields, but it is not developed in an efficient or sustainable way. The researchers who develop this software, while well-versed in their discipline, generally do not have sufficient training and understanding of best practices that ease development and maintainability and that encourage sustainability and reproducibility. In response, this project is conceptualizing a US Research Software Sustainability Institute that will validate and address at least three classes of concerns (functioning of the individual and team, the research software, and the research field itself), impacting all software development and maintenance projects across all of NSF. URSSI conceptualization includes workshops and a widely-distributed survey that engages important stakeholder communities to learn about the software they produce and use, and the ways they contemplate sustaining it, following the paths blazed by other successful software institutes
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