software engineering

Daniel S. Katz from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois

This talk will discuss the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS), a diamond OA journal for open source research software. JOSS depends on volunteers for almost all of its functions, and most of these volunteers are those who do research software engineering (RSEng) as part of their job, and many of these people who do it for more than half of their job consider themselves research software engineers (RSEs). The talk will discuss how JOSS is run as an open-source community project, and how it interacts with the RSEng community. This includes that JOSS: runs on GitHub using a helpful bot to automate actions; has reviews that are open, collaborative, and constructive; and uses typical open-source mechanisms for communication. While JOSS reviews are checklist-driven, some of the checklist items are not purely binary; instead, they have values of bad, ok, and good, where ok and good are both sufficient to pass, but good is used to push the community to better
practices that those that are merely ok. JOSS communication using GitHub issues for discussion of reviews, Slack for internal team discussions, and traditional software project mechanisms including social media to announce publications and news, and the new JOSSCast to provide interviews with some paper authors. JOSS has been demonstrated to scale successfully in terms of both people and costs, and we look forward to continuing to support the research software community move towards more recognition and better practices.

You can find the slides from all the previous talks from the HiRSE Seminar series on zenodo and there’s a feedback form for you to tell us what you think about the seminar series and what other topics we should cover.

Institutions

• National Center for Supercomputing Applications

This year's 45th CERN School of Computing will be organized by DESY. The school will take place between the 8^th-21^st September 2024 in Hamburg, Germany. This year’s School is organized in collaboration with the Deutches Elektronen-Synchroton (DESY) and the event will be hosted at the DESY campus in Hamburg.

As part of the school, there will be a public evening event that aims to provide an overview of the computing challenges at CERN and at large facilities in basic research. In addition, the event will offer a glimpse into career possibilities in the field and enable networking. More information can be found at: here

Please register for this event by 11 September 23:59

The event is free of charge and will take place one Wednesday, September 18th, 2024 in the DESY Auditorium and online via Zoom.

Climate change research today relies on climate information from the past. Historical climate records of temperature observations form global gridded datasets that are examined, for example, in IPCC reports. However, the datasets combining measurement records are sparse in the past. Even today, they contain missing values. We found that recently successful image inpainting technologies, such as those found on smartphones to get rid of unwanted objects or people in photos, are useful here. The derived AI networks are able to reconstruct artificially cropped versions in the grid space for any given month using the missing values observation mask. So herewith we have found with AI a technique that gives us data from the past that we never measured with instruments.  Other important datasets used in the Assessment Report 6 of the IPCC to study climate change, as well as advanced applications such as downscaling in atmosphere and ocean, a hybrid (AI&ESM) data assimilation approach within ICON, or precipitation in broken radar fields are shown in this presentation.

Climate research, including the study mentioned in the previous paragraph, often requires substantial technical expertise. This involves managing data standards, various file formats, software engineering, and high-performance computing. Translating scientific questions into code that can answer them demands significant effort. The question is, why? Data analysis platforms like Freva (Kadow et al. 2021, e.g., gems.dkrz.de) aim to enhance user convenience, yet programming expertise is still required. In this context, we introduce a large language model setup and chat bot interface based on GPT-4/ChatGPT, which enables climate analysis without technical obstacles, including language barriers. This approach is tailored to the needs of the broader climate community, which deals with massive data sets from kilometer-scale modeling and requires a processing environment utilizing modern technologies, but addressing society after all - such as those in the Earth Virtualization Engines (EVE eve4climate.org).

Kadow, C., Hall, D.M. & Ulbrich, U. Artificial intelligence reconstructs missing climate information. Nat. Geosci. 13, 408-413 (2020)

An exciting talk at the interface of Informatics and Physics by the Rosetta Software Coordinator (European Space Agency), Alessandro Ercolani.

Rosetta is a space mission of the European Space Agency – ESA. It was launched in 2004 and after 10 years of interplanetary travel reached the comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko and sent the lander Philae to its surface: the first time for humankind to touch down on a comet. Alessandro Ercolani was Rosetta Software Coordinator in the Mission Control Team at the time of the launch, and he’ll bring the audience through an exciting trip across our solar system with many pictures and animations, to tell the story of this fantastic exploration mission.

Institutions

• UHH