The next installment of the Research Programming in Practice series will be by Mike Jackson. Mike is a software architect at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre at Edinburgh University, and provides consultancy and training as part of The Software
Sustainability Institute. The event will take place on Tuesday 14th May at 3:30pm, in Roberts 309.

The Software Sustainability Institute is a UK facility which promotes better research through better software. We seek to shape UK research policy around software, engage with research communities, provide training in software development to researchers and to provide consultancy to specific research projects.

In this talk, I’ll give an introduction to The Software Sustainability Institute and an example of one of our successful collaborations – with MICE, the Muon Ion Cooling Experiment. MICE is a UK-based international collaboration of around 100 particle and accelerator physicists. The collaboration is based at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and are working on a fundamental component of a proposed neutrino factory. MAUS (MICE Analysis User Software) is a modular, data-analysis package that provides a framework in which various MICE software functionality can communicate. MAUS is designed to support both online analysis of live data and detailed offline data analysis, simulation, and accelerator design.

I’ll describe how we worked with MICE to provide consultancy on how they could manage their software development, review their online resources from a sustainability perspective, and contribute to extending MAUS to support distributed job execution and analysis.

This will be an exciting opportunity to learn about the work of the SSI, who do great work to improve the quality and longevity of research software throughout the UK. (Disclosure: I’m an SSI Fellow.)