jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
This resource first appeared in issue #107 on 29 Jan 2022 and has tags Strategy: Product/Service Management, Strategy: Marketing
Research Software Engineering to reduce the environmental impact of a long-running script - Univ of Bristol Advanced Computing Research Centre
RSE Case Studies - N8CIR
In research computing, too much of the work we do goes unsung. This is a problem for a number of reasons - institutional decision makers don’t see the impact of our work, and other researchers we could be working with don’t have a good sense of what we do. As with the technical areas of research computing, documentation is key!
In the first article, U Bristol describes in detail the 25,000x speedup of a perl script to find a minimal set of genetic markers from a genotyping dataset. It’s a nice long-form writeup which gives insight into how U Bristol team members work, what working with them looks like, how long a project takes, and the benefits other than just speedup that accrue to the researchers.
The N8 Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research (N8 CIR) has been writing up case studies of larger-scale projects for a while, in concise accessible slide format, broken down by subject area. While the shorter form writeup doesn’t offer the same “day in the life” description of how works, the collection of 15 of them gives an overview of the kinds of projects this team can take on. The PDFs of the slides are also very attractive and professional looking, at the cost of having to download and open a PDF.
Would one of these approaches work well for advertising your team’s work? Could regular communications with your clients be repurposed and be distilled into publicly-viewable case studies?
