The Reasonable Performance Computing Special Interest Group (SIG-RPC) was founded in September 2024, following positive feedback to a talk I delivered at RSECon24 titled Performant Python Patterns. This feedback exposed agreement from RSEs that maybe we could help empower researchers to identify and solve some of their worst performance mistakes.

With a background in Computer Science and early-career experience as an RSE specialising in GPU parallelism, I frequently encounter small but impactful mistakes in code written by researchers who are largely self-taught programmers. These issues, often redundant logic or poorly chosen data structures, are often quick for me to identify and resolve and in some cases yielded order-of-magnitude performance improvements.

Initially, I developed a Carpentries-style course to introduce profiling and optimisation to Python users, which later inspired the RSECon24 talk. The course has since been delivered at several institutions. Research code, however, is extremely diverse, with countless combinations of languages and libraries. This makes it hard to justify the cost of creating instructor-led training for ever smaller audiences. This led to the realisation that a different approach was needed. The aim was both to raise awareness that the fundamentals of software performance do not require advanced technical expertise and to encourage people to share their experiences, since no single programmer can know the performance quirks of every language and library.

Following the response to my talk, I organised a small meeting with people interested in building a community focused on the research, development, and advocacy of performance best practices for those who work closely with software. With support from the Society of Research Software Engineers (Society RSE), we held the first SIG-RPC AGM and agreed on the terms of reference. During this discussion, we also identified a second area of underserved interest among members: improving non-technical interfaces to HPC resources.

With a high-level vision for what I wanted to develop, and limited experience in community building, it made sense to apply for the SSI fellowship, and I was accepted into the 2025 cohort. The fellowship has provided both financial support for promoting SIG-RPC and access to a network of like-minded people with extensive experience in building and sustaining communities.

Building a new community from scratch without dedicated time is difficult, so the first significant progress came during the winter break, when I was able to draft the initial SIG-RPC website. It is a small static site with a blog and knowledge bases containing mini-guides on profilers and optimisation patterns, all of which can be contributed to through GitHub.

With the website established, our next priority was to start promoting our work and encouraging engagement. I introduced the SIG with two lightning talks: one at the SSI Collaborations Workshop in March and the other at the N8CIR RSE meetup in July.

Around this period, Jost Migenda formally joined the Python profiling short course as a maintainer after contributing significant improvements while delivering it locally. This helped move the course closer to a stable state, and Jost later presented both the course and the SIG at EuroSciPy, which gave us our first international exposure.

Since SIG-RPC was founded under Society RSE, RSECon25 felt like the natural venue for our first workshop. We ran a 90-minute session to present the SIG-RPC knowledge bases and to encourage attendees to contribute guides and feedback. The workshop was valuable, with attendees providing over 40 new contributions. It also highlighted both the amount of work still required to build a valuable resource, and that further work is needed to streamline the submission of new guides to our website. At RSECon25 we were also invited to join HPC-RSE SIG’s training session, and took part in Green RSE SIG’s activities.

A year after our initial AGM, we held our second. Two officers had stepped down due to career changes during the year, so it was time to elect a new committee. Attendance was slightly higher, which was encouraging, and Jost formally joined as deputy chair.

Since then we have presented SIG-RPC at the DiRAC HPC-AI and CoSeC (part of Computing Insight UK) conferences to more technical audiences, where we continue to see enthusiasm for the project.

With our initial infrastructure now in place, our aim for the second year is to expand collaboration with established communities. SIG-RPC sits near many related areas, including HPC, green computing, and language or library-based communities. Our next event is a co-hosted virtual hackathon with Fortran-index in late January.

We hope these more technical collaborations will help us develop the website to the point where it can be shared more widely, particularly with the less technical audiences who stand to benefit most.

If you want to get involved, visit the SIG-RPC website to join our mailing list or slack channel, or submit a guide or feedback on our GitHub!