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A workshop on 'Research Software Engineers in HPC: Creating Community, Building Careers, Addressing Challenges' (RSE-HPC-2021) will be be held in conjunction with SC21 on Monday 15 November.

Research software engineers (RSEs) are critical to the impact of HPC, data science, and the larger scientific community. They have existed for decades, though often not under that name. However, the past few years have seen the development of the RSE concept, common job titles, and career paths; the creation of professional networks to connect RSEs; and the emergence of RSE groups at universities, national laboratories, and industry.

This workshop will bring together RSEs and allies involved in HPC, from all over the world, to grow the RSE community by establishing and strengthening professional networks of current RSEs and RSE leaders. There will be a discussion of the current activities and plans of national RSE organisations, discuss the needs of RSEs and RSE groups, and write a report on ways RSE organisations can help address these.

Most of the workshop time will be spent in interactive discussions, preceded by a keynote address and several shorter talks to establish context.

Submissions

Prospective participants are encourages to submit position papers (limit of two pages, not counting references; no format prescribed) on topics related to RSE issues. Submissions are particularly encouraged on the keynote topic:

• Do RSEs need to change for exascale?

Other possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Career paths: how do RSEs want to be hired, promoted and evaluated?
• Building RSE organisations: how to find RSEs in your country/region and how to motivate them to join the network and engage?
• Supporting RSE organisations: what can be done to help RSEs (and those supporting RSEs) at international, national, regional, and local levels?
• Making the business case for RSEs and RSE groups: evidence, case studies, tactics?
• How do we want funders to support RSE roles and activities?
• Building in RSE requirements as part of wider research infrastructure.
• Providing mentoring and training for RSEs.

These papers will not be part of the SC proceedings, but the authors of accepted submissions will be asked to self-publish their submissions (after revisions, if they so choose) to an archival repository (e.g. Zenodo, figshare, OSF). Our website will then provide links to those self-published documents. Some submitters will be invited to present their papers at the workshop as lightning talks or to participate as panellists where appropriate.

Submissions are particularly encouraged from first-time conference presenters, and from members of groups that have historically been underrepresented in the HPC community.

Papers and discussion topics should be submitted here. The deadline for submissions is Friday 6 August 2021, at 11:59 PM AoE (UTC-12).

Timeline

• Submissions open: Monday 7 June
• Submissions due: Friday 6 August
• Notifications sent: Friday 3 September
• Program finalized: Friday 17 September
• Workshop date: Monday 15 November

For more information

See the workshop website: https://us-rse.org/rse-hpc-2021/

Or contact the organisers: sc-ws-rse-hpc@info.supercomputing.org