The Conference for Research Software Engineering in Germany is a yearly event to foster synergies between scientist who code, domain experts and HPC practitioners. The 6th iteration (deRSE26) was located at the University of Stuttgart and co-organized by a member of the MultiXscale consortium. The event attracted 280 participants and featured 90 posters and 100 talks, workshops, and interactive sessions organised in 5 parallel sessions.
A full day was dedicated to HPC, with a 3-hour workshop on the Jülich Benchmarking Environment and a 3-hour HPC Carpentry instructor on-boarding session. We also learned about regional HPC consulting services offered by HPC.nrw and bwRSE4HPC, the commissioning of the Tier-3 BinAC2 cluster to democratize access to HPC in academia, the new FutuRSI institute to support developers of research software, a national initiative at NFDI to catalogue research software and run interactive Jupyter notebooks in the cloud, and the EU-funded EVERSE project to catalogue research software and document their compliance with FAIR principles. We got updates on the multiscale and multiphysics simulation software ESPResSo, waLBerla and TrixiParticles.jl, on HPC workflows with pyiron/Semantikon/APE, and on porting applications to HPC with Coccinelle semantic patching.
The event concluded with a guided tour of the Tier-1 HLRS supercomputer facility, where we learned about Cray computers, the upcoming AI Factory HammerHAI, sustainable computing, and how heat generated by the next flagship supercomputer Herder will be captured and redistributed into the University district heating network to reduce its carbon footprint.
Many contributions to deRSE26 covered topics that MultiXscale actively engages in, namely porting software to HPC, software marketplaces, and HPC training. National and regional initiatives such as NFDI, FutuRSI, HPC.nrw and bwRSE4HPC show a need in academia to get better access to infrastructure, consulting services and training opportunities for software developers, similar to how National Competence Centres (NCCs) provide HPC and software-related services to industry and academia at the European level. The conference abstracts and slides can be obtained from the event website and the associated Zenodo community.
*Group photo taken by Adam Pagan, licensed under CC-BY-4.0. Talk photos by Volodymyr Kushnarenko.
