Professional skills development for RSEs specialising in HPC

Research Software Engineers (RSEs) combine professional software engineering expertise with a good understanding of research practices. In high performance computing (HPC), RSEs play a critical role in the research pipeline, leveraging their skills to ensure sustainable and reproducible research outputs. However, there are still no established entry points or career progression routes for RSEs. Additionally, the increasingly diverse backgrounds of RSE and HPC professionals make training provision and professional development more difficult. Many professionals are forced to discover, develop and progress their skills on the job, which can be challenging and time consuming.

The UNIVERSE-HPC, or ‘Understanding and Nurturing an Integrated Vision for Education in RSE and HPC’, project was funded by the ExCALIBUR programme with the aim of defining training frameworks for RSEs specialising in HPC. Over the last three years the project has investigated the RSE skills landscape, outlined a curriculum for an MSc in RSE in HPC, worked on a learning pathways approach, developed and piloted course materials for professional development, and led many community-building activities. The underlying goal was to enable more people from a wide diversity of disciplines and backgrounds to obtain the skills and experience required for a successful RSE career. 

UNIVERSE-HPC was a collaborative project between the universities of Edinburgh, Oxford, Southampton and Imperial College London, with each partner being in charge of a different component. 

The University of Edinburgh led the work of exploring the current skills and training opportunities landscape, and investigating new frameworks for formal and informal training and education. One of the key outcomes was a proposal defining a curriculum for an MSc in RSE-HPC split into two tracks: 1) RSE for HPC modeling and simulation and 2) RSE for large-scale data science. 

Learning pathways

To support informal professional development, the project started exploring the feasibility of the learning pathways approach. This included outlining example pathways and investigating what tools and strategies are needed to make this approach viable for a large group of stakeholders (leaners, trainers, training providers etc). We confirmed that to make the skills easier to acquire and progress, it is necessary to make the whole training and education ecosystem more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable), and to attract more people into the RSE and HPC roles it is crucial to make the skill and job landscape more transparent and easier to navigate. 

Accessible content

The work led by the University of Oxford focused on collating and developing training content and making it more accessible for both learners and trainers. To address the gap between current open source and commercial learning management platforms, the UNIVERSE-HPC project has developed Gutenberg - an open-source web application for hosting and delivering courses based on open-source material. The Oxford RSE Gutenberg deployment can be viewed at https://train.rse.ox.ac.uk/. The material itself uses a simple markdown syntax with accompanying metadata defined in YAML blocks. 

All materials that have been developed or adapted as part of the UNIVERSE-HPC project can be found in the project’s github repository. 

Content delivery

The project also explored different modes of content delivery over nine pilot workshop events, capturing advantages and disadvantages of in-person, online and hybrid delivery modes.  These experiences informed the development of an instructional guide aimed at training event instructors and organisers. This work was led by the University of Southampton.

Community building

The final important element of the project was led by Imperial College London and focused on community building through activities that facilitate professional development and peer networks. Two notable examples were ‘Byte-sized RSE’ and training practice seminar series. 

The Byte-sized RSE series is a collection of online sessions that was developed to address the lack of time learners have to learn new technical skills. Each session lasted between 60 and 90 minutes and consisted of three parts - introductory presentation on the topics, interactive exercise and final Q&A and discussion. Each session had a companion podcast (produced by Peter Schmidt) released as part of the Code for Thought podcast series, providing a reference point for the topics covered and including discussions with one or more interviewees who are subject experts. 

The training practice seminars brought together trainers and educators to discuss challenges, lessons learned and best practices. Those sessions were offered in-person and online to support the growing community of technical trainers in the research technical space, both within the UK and beyond. A series of hybrid training infrastructure hackathons, focused on contributing enhancements and updates to the Gutenberg platform, were also run. 

The final UNIVERSE-HPC event “HPC Ready - Developing RSE and HPC skills” will be held on 27 March from 10am to 4pm (GMT). The event will take place in person in Bayes Centre at the University of Edinburgh and online. Everyone is welcome to attend. More details and the registration link can be found on the event page. 

Follow-up projects

Although the UNIVERSE-HPC project is coming to an end, the work to improve access to professional development opportunities for RSEs in HPC will be continued across two follow-up projects. Over the next two years, the DRIFT project will look into the training needs of broadly defined research facilitators and research project managers, and the CHARTED project will aim to make the RSE and HPC education and training ecosystem more FAIR. 

CHARTED is one of the projects that were recently funded under the UKRI Digital Research Technical Professional Skills NetworkPlus programme. It will run from 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2029 and support community-led projects. More details about the project, including funding opportunities, will be disseminated later this year. 

Please contact me if you are interested in any of the work undertaken in the above three projects.