Improving NeSI researchers' productivity with a consultancy service

The primary goals of NeSI’s consultancy service are to enable increased scale and complexity of research and to help researchers use NeSI’s computing capabilities to increase research outputs and impact. Here we will present some insights and examples of the types of work we do in the NeSI consultancy service.

Recent trends in the types of work we have been undertaking have shown that researchers are increasingly interested in software sustainability, which covers topics such as build systems, version control and testing. We often get called in to boost the performance of code written in scripting languages, such as Python and R, where writing compiled language extensions that utilise shared memory parallelism can often make a large difference to performance. Increasingly we are also being asked to help with the visualisation of data, including using ParaView to visualise 3d data and implementing in-situ visualisation in simulation codes using ParaView Catalyst.