Changing software a nightmare for tracking scientific data
Latest version published on 3 October, 2016.
Following the recent Nature article "Computational science: ... Error - why scientific programming does not compute" spawned by the Climategate affair, there's another interesting article titled "Changing software, hardware a nightmare for tracking scientific data" from the Nobel Intent blog on Ars Technica. Again, it is the pace of technological advance, so important for making new discoveries, which is also causing us to have to question if we can reproduce our past results.
The author notes the difficulties of keeping a fully reproducible analysis pipeline working, with…
Life after NeSCForge - surviving a repository closure
Latest version published on 3 October, 2016.
NeSCForge has been the home to many of the software projects from the UK's e-Science programme and beyond. However, pressures of funding have led to the decision to close NeSCForge permanently on 20th December 2010.
So what do you do if your software was using NeSCForge or another site marked for closure? Don't panic - it's fairly painless and the SSI can help guide you through the process.
We've recently extended our collection of guides for developers to include:
choosing a repository, migrating to a new repository, retrieving files from NeSCForge, and…What cloud computing got right
Latest version published on 3 October, 2016.
Cloud computing is, in my experience, a subject that creates excitement and scepticism in equal quantities. My introduction to the subject came courtesy of a presentation by Werner Vogels, Amazon's Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. It was a fascinating presentation, but it was even more interesting to hear the passion behind the questions that followed. I’m not going to focus on the technical side of things in this post, because what interests me is the way in which cloud computing has grasped the public’s attention.
Unlike Grid…
Computational science: eliminating the errors
Latest version published on 3 October, 2016.
There's an interesting feature over at Nature by Zeeya Merali called "Computational science: ... Error - why scientific programming does not compute" (disclaimer: I was one of the people interviewed for the piece). In it, Merali considers the issues of computational software written in the scientific context particularly in light of the problem revealed by the leak of emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia last year.
As the article notes, a lot of scientific software has grown ever more complex and there is a steep learning…
"Riding the Wave"
Latest version published on 3 October, 2016.
With another hat on I've been reading the recent report from the European Commission's High-Level Expert Group on Scientific Data - "Riding the Wave: how Europe can gain from the rising tide of scientific data". It captures the current state of research's digital landscape very well, offers a compelling vision of the value of scientific digital data twenty years hence, and recommends a number of key policy steps for the EU to consider.
I recommend it. It's a good read - not perhaps in the same way that Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey novels are a good read - but it does underline…
Ask Steve! - Welcome to Ask Steve
Latest version published on 30 September, 2016.
In 2010 a crack developer was asked to join the Software Sustainability Institute. This man promptly set up as the Institute’s software architect. Today, still wanted by a number of projects, Steve survives as a developer of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can email him, maybe you can Ask Steve!
Whenever we have a software problem at the Software Sustainability Institute, we simply ask Steve. He’s our in-house software architect and all-round guru of code. Then we got to thinking: it’…
Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! Plenty to shout about at the AHM 2010.
Latest version published on 3 October, 2016.
Nothing says AHM in quite the same way as the call to arms "Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!" shouted at top volume by Malcolm Atkinson - UK e-Science envoy, SSI co-Investigator and part-time town crier. Malcolm is clearly aware that there are few things that can clear a room faster than a shouting Scotsman. So here we are: the ninth UK e-Science All Hands Meeting and the first public outing for the Software Sustainability Institute. What does Cardiff hold for us this year?
It's certainly a fantastic venue. Cardiff City Hall is an Edwardian masterpiece heavily…
Keep up to date with the Software Sustainability Institute
Latest version published on 3 October, 2016.
At least in one way, I stand out from everyone else at the institute: I've got the longest job title. I'm the institute's dissemination and outreach coordinator. In short, this means that it's my job to make sure that people know what we're working on, who we're working with and what we've learned by working with them. We're going to be generating a lot of news, so we're working hard to make sure that it's easy to follow our work. For that reason, I thought that my first blog post should be a round up of the different ways that you can keep up to date with…