Minisymposium Presentation

Research Software Engineers (RSEs) combine professional software engineering expertise with a good understanding of research practices, ensuring sustainable and reproducible research outputs. In High-Performance Computing (HPC) RSEs play a critical role in the research pipeline, but there are no established routes for becoming an RSE and developing required skills. Additionally, the increasingly diverse backgrounds of RSE and HPC professionals make training provision and professional development more difficult. Many professionals are forced to discover, develop and progress their skills on the job, which can be challenging and time consuming. Finding the right content can be difficult, especially outside of the higher education context. To ensure sustainable growth of research communities, it is necessary to expand and improve existing HPC and RSE education and training programmes to mirror technological changes, and provide people in research software roles with the right set of skills. It is also necessary to make the HPC and RSE training ecosystem more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) and to explore new approaches to skills development in both formal and informal settings. This presentation will briefly describe the work done within the UNIVERSE-HPC project (https://www.universe-hpc.ac.uk/), and plans for the follow-up projects - DRIFT and CHARTED.