Research Software Engineering (RSE)

The Research Software Engineering team works with research groups across a range of subject areas to create and improve research software and research computing workflows; the team also advocates for
and educates on research software engineering best practices.

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Contact RSE

View the webpage: https://rse.shef.ac.uk/ 

For queries relating to collaborating with the RSE team on projects: rse@sheffield.ac.uk

To contact the RSE team about seminars, training or JADE: rse-team-group@sheffield.ac.uk

Join our mailing list so as to be notified when we advertise talks and workshops by subscribing to this Google Group.

Code Clinic: discuss a research software/computing/data issue with people from the RSE team or IT Services via our consultation service.

RSE Service

The RSE team aims to collaborate with you to help improve your research software. We can provide dedicated staff to ensure that you can deliver excellent research software engineering on your research projects (see example projects and testimonials). Supporting the entire University, we have collaborators in every faculty and have supported researchers in a range of subject areas including engineering, mathematics, computer science, biology, linguistics, physics, chemistry and geography.

The RSE team provides a mixture of

  • Paid service via grant funding (as percentages of an RSE FTE)
  • Paid service for departments and core accounts (as percentages of an RSE FTE)
  • Limited free at point of use support (via community activities, training and the Code Clinic service we co-run with IT Services Research and Innovation IT).

Areas of expertise within the team include:

  • code optimisation and performance
  • reproducibility and embedding good software engineering practice with your project or team
  • GPU computing and Deep Learning
  • statistical analysis and data visualisation
  • High Performance Computing for local/national/international/cloud systems
  • general software development
  • development of impact case studies
  • consultancy
  • training
  • education delivery and support

Our list of specialist expertise is constantly changing and improving so please contact us if you are unsure if we can support your research software needs or read more on what we do.

Why use the RSE service

The RSE service allows you to get dedicated help for professional software engineers. Recruitment of such skills is very difficult on research projects, especially when you only require short term expertise. UKRI (and most other UK and EU funding agencies) understand what an import part RSEs have on research and would like to see that they are being offered sustainable careers with academia. The RSE team provides this through underwritten roles and by allowing RSEs to work to a unique job description. If you want to deliver software engineering as part of your grant application then there is a good chance that you will be required to demonstrate how this will be done sustainability. The RSE team is an excellent way to provide this evidence to your funders.

Please see the RSE webpages for information on the following

  • How to use the paid RSE service
  • Normal RSE service usage (grant-costed service)
  • RSE service charge
  • Collaborative research software development
  • Contributing to the RSE team (underwriting a RSE role)

Centres of excellence

The University's cross-faculty research centres harness our interdisciplinary expertise to solve the world's most pressing challenges.