Speaker
Description
Research software has become an essential part of modern science, but many research groups struggle to develop and maintain code that is efficient, scalable, and sustainable. This is especially important as researchers turn to high-performance computing (HPC) systems to analyse increasingly larger datasets and perform more complex simulations. Common reasons for these include time constraints, a lack of software engineering experience, and frequent changes in personnel due to fixed-term research contracts. This can impact software performance and reproducibility, and can be detrimental to long-term maintainability of the software.
The joint initiative bwRSE4HPC was launched in 2025 to help address these issues. Being funded by the Ministry of Science, Research and Arts of Baden-Württemberg, the initiative provides researchers across the state direct access to a team of Research Software Engineers (RSEs) from the Scientific Computing Center (SCC) at KIT and the Scientific Software Center (SSC) at Heidelberg University. We work together with research groups to improve the performance, scalability, and usability of their software, with a particular focus on making effective use of HPC infrastructure. The initiative supports both experienced HPC users and researchers who are only starting to work with larger computing systems.
We provide support for short- and medium-term projects, usually lasting between 4 and 24 weeks. Depending on the needs of a project, this may include parallelization, GPU acceleration, profiling and performance optimization, improvements to build systems, language bindings, or automated testing. The support is free of charge and is adapted to the software, goals, and existing experience of each research group.
This poster gives an overview of the goals, organization, and scope of bwRSE4HPC and presents several software projects supported over the past year. The examples show the range of problems encountered in practice and the kinds of improvements that can be achieved through direct collaboration with RSEs.