CodeRefinery was one of only three projects to enter funding negotiations with the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration (NeIC) this year, the other two projects being Puhuri, which aims to develop services and tools for seamless access to the LUMI supercomputer across borders, and the new NordIQuEst project which will be pushing the boundaries of quantum computing in the Nordics+Estonia in coming years.
ENCCS is partnering with CodeRefinery in this third funding period which will focus on the project’s long-term sustainability. The aim will be twofold: to establish CodeRefinery as a long-term cross-border collaboration between partner universities and organisations running training events on FAIR and reproducible software practices, and to support the emerging community of research software engineers in the Nordic and Baltic regions. CodeRefinery is demonstrably helping researchers write higher-quality research software through in-person and massive online training workshops on programming best practices that are missing from most university curricula, and we at ENCCS are very excited about contributing to these ambitious goals as one of the project partners.
As a project partner we will be contributing in-kind to teaching and helping out with massive online CodeRefinery workshops that will be held biannually in spring and autumn. This year’s spring workshop was held online over 6 half days on March 22-24 and 29-31. Thanks to an innovative online workshop format delivered by the team during the pandemic, over 200 participants could follow the workshop via a live stream on Twitch. Many of these simultaneously attended a Zoom meeting where they could learn and solve exercises collaboratively in a small team together with a volunteer exercise leader, some met in-person at their university campuses and followed the workshop together via a large projector, while others followed independently. A full playlist of all the lessons are available on Youtube for anyone who wishes to learn better software engineering practices at their own pace!
We are also considering whether we should offer our own ENCCS-CodeRefinery workshops to our target audiences in industry, the public sector and academia. ENCCS strives to assist researchers, engineers and data scientists from these different sectors in getting started with EuroHPC-JU systems, and better practices in managing research software and data are valuable when working on HPC. If you are interested in attending training events on any of the CodeRefinery topics, please get in touch and let us know!
