Dr Sam Mangham

https://slides.com/sammangham/2026-07-23-astro-house

An Intro To

What Is The SRSG?

What Do We Do?

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

• Multifluid Electromagneto-HydroDynamics

• 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