By Steve Crouch.

The SeIUCCR Summer School enables other researchers to learn about tools and techniques for e-Infrastructure, software development and data management to support and improve their science. So last week I made my way up to Oxford to host a session on sustainable software development at this year's Summer School, and based on feedback from participants, this year's School was even more successful than the one held last year.

Targeted at UK doctoral and postdoctoral researchers in the Engineering and Physical Sciences, demand for the School was high - only 30 out of 120 applicants were accepted for the course.

Building on the successful format from last year, attendees heard how e-Infrastructure was helping a number of SeIUCCR Community  Champions in their work. The participants were also taught approaches and practical skills for making the most out of Cloud and Grid infrastructures. For Cloud, these included Amazon's Web Services, Eduserv and Microsoft Azure, with Grid computing aspects provided by the NGS. Practical management of data was also covered by the Digital Curation Centre and the NGS, a topic of particular interest to researchers where accessibility to experimental data and reproducibility of research are crucially important.

Strongly related to the reproducibility of research is the session I presented on managing software in a sustainable way. The tutorial had attendees considering approaches, tools and techniques for software sustainability, and gave them an opportunity to use the Institute's online Software Sustainability Evaluation Service to provide recommendations on what aspects to consider for best achieving this. Based on feedback from participants, the session was awarded an average of 4.1/5, and reflected the very high degree of satisfaction across the workshop as a whole.

Like last year, I also participated in the ask the experts group session. But this time I was most impressed with an innovative improvement in how it was organised, with participants being arranged in the venue according to their interests. This enabled us experts to focus on groups with similar issues and questions more efficiently. This year's experts session was even more successful than last year, returning an astonishing 4.8/5 from the participants!

A collaboration between the Software Sustainability Institute and the NGS, the SeIUCCR project develops and supports a network of Community Champions to promote uptake of e-Infrastructures within their communities. You can find more information at the project website.