About Research Software Reactor

As part of the Microsoft EMEA Higher Education Summit meeting in Brussels in March 2019, members of the Research Software Engineering (RSE) community across EMEA held a round table discussion with Microsoft to explore ways of making Cloud more research friendly. While a diverse range of opportunities and barriers were touched upon, the key issue that dominated discussion was skills and training in the context of both RSE’s and the communities they support.

The main cloud providers have created a vast repository of training material (e.g. on GitHub) and many learning pathways through that material. However, few of these have been created with the academic research community in mind.

The Research Software Reactor was established to bring together the RSE and research community interested in cloud computing, to run events and develop resources for and with the community members. Though we might have sponsorship for some of the events this is a comunity led effort and focused on open tools, open research and open practices. Thus these are not vendor events and neither we do have any special kind of arrangements with the sponsors to sell products to the attendees.

The strategy is to run a series of sprint/hackathon style events that focus on a specific theme or proof-of-concept (POC) projects within research software computing with the following objectives:

• Create repositories based on scenario/POC solutions for RSEs to build upon:
  • Infrastructure templates for deployment.
  • Hands on training and specialized learning resources.
  • Provide bases for developing cost model for budgeting.
• Troubleshoot issues experienced by research community using the public cloud.
• Explore cloud best practices for scientific computing.

Code of conduct

Finally all the activities: online and in person are directed by The Research Software Reactor Code of Conduct that can be found on this site.

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Please get in touch if you would like to host an event at your local institution and/or to propose a POC for the Research Software Reactor.