Sam Mangham
Senior Research Software Engineer @ University of Southampton
Dr Sam Mangham
An Intro To
What Is The SRSG?
What Do We Do?
Ben Thomas
Senior Policy Fellow
Sam Mangham
Senior Research Software Engineers
Bryan Gillis
Philly Wilding
Senior RSE,
Training Lead
Jamie Court
Research Software Engineer
Ed Parkinson
Michael Donnay
Senior Policy Fellow
Simon Hettrick
Senior Policy Fellow
Prof. of RSE
Lindsay Ballantyne
Steve Crouch
Principle Research Software Engineers
Steve Pooley
Mehtap O. A.
Simon Hettrick
External-Facing
What Do We Do?
- 3 community staff
- Mostly coordinated with SSI
- Society of RSE
- RSE Conference
- Hidden REF
- RSE team
- Society of RSE
- RSE Conference
Community
- 1 policy researcher
- Hidden REF
- Industrial Engagement
Policy
- RSE team
- Intermediate Skills
- Testing, continuous integration, design patterns
- Demand-driven
- AI Skills
- HPC Skills
- Policy-driven
- Industry Skills
Training
Software Development
What Do We Do?
- 11 RSEs
- 8 cost-recovered from grants
- 3 funded via HPC
- Usually ~2 projects at ~50% to account for delays
- Very flexible with researchers
- Arguably too flexible...
Software Development Team
- C, C++, FORTRAN
- Python, R
- Webdev
- Legacy code
- Machine learning
- Testing
- Optimisation
- Containerisation
- Documentation
- Training
Skills
- Simulation & modelling
- Data science
- HPC
- Safety critical industry
- Chemistry
- Physics (Astro, Nuclear)
- Biology
- Psychology
- Maths
- Computer Science
Backgrounds
-
Ad-hoc support
-
~1 week free
-
Advice, consultation, project design
-
-
Governed projects
-
1-12 weeks free
-
Porting codes to HPC, optimisation, enhancement
-
Free HPC
- Small (1-4 month FTE)
- Usually 'short' notice
- Impact Acceleration Fund
- Long (3-24 month FTE)
- Written into grants
- Sometimes hire off them
Grant-Funded
Data Science & ML
Web Platforms
High Performance
Computing
Software Archeology
MoleGazer
Swiftly
DAQ2
Sirocco[*]
Radii Devices
CilliaCatch
CSPDB
HEPMDB
METHOD
- Modern C++ code
- Implement MPI & CUDA parallelism
- Profiling for hardware selection
- Documentation & testing
- HDF5 output
Joining the Dots
- Kepler Mapper Python library
- Topological mapping of high-dimensional data
- Web interface & data management framework
- Added persistance homology
- Bugfixes and enhancements to Kepler Mapper
SPACE Labelling Tool
- SPectrogram Analysis & Cataloguing Environment
- ML on 10s of GB of satellite data
- Manual feature selection
- 10+ speedup within a week
- Huge space saving
- Extensible, multi-step pipeline
- Easy-to-use GUI*
Web Apps For Engineers
- MatLab scripts for wind turbine models
- Re-implemented in Python
- Web UI for ease of use
- Increased impact
Local Training
What Do We Do?
- Regular customers!
- Machine Intelligence for Nanoelectronic Devices (MINDS)
- Sustainable AI CDT (SustAI)
- Quantum Biology (QuantBio)
- Quantum Technology Engineering (QTE)
- Software Carpentries
- Git, Bash, Python
- Commission material
- Managing an Academic Software Project
Centres for Doctoral Training
- Whole-university training
- Run regularly 1-2 a year, at the start of semesters
- Basic intro programme - Git/Bash/Python or Git/R
- Schools request specific training
- ML with SciKit Learn for Physics
- New material based on need
- Git GUI course
Doctoral College & Schools
Thanks for listening!
2026-07-23 Astro House
By Sam Mangham
2026-07-23 Astro House
Slides for 20min presentation at Astro House about the RSG.
