International RSE collaboration with ICCS and VESRI

The Virtual Earth System Research Institute (VESRI) is made up of several large international science teams of about thirty researchers in each. They study topics essential in climate science including sea ice dynamics, gravity wave parameterisations, machine learning in multi-scale modes and a novel land ecosystem model. The Institute of Computing for Climate Science (ICCS) is domain specific, international form of RSE group designed to (in the first instance) collaborate with VESRI teams by combining research software engineering, programming language research, machine learning and data science techniques.

The ICCS supports the VESRI teams by collaborating as RSEs on software projects, consulting, running training events (e.g. Summer School) in the UK and as side events at other conferences like WCRP OSC, and hosting relevant conferences like Climate Informatics. We help with typical RSE concerns such as version control, testing, continuous integration, packaging, documentation, as well as more specific topics like machine learning, coupling, IO library API design, and GPU programming. An important goal of the ICCS is the development of RSEs themselves and the institute is also partnered with a broad program of international Virtual Institutes for Scientific Software (VISS).

This poster introduces the team, the work, the group model and highlights some recent scientific results.