Code for Thought

Welcome back to a new season of Code for Thought. The subject of this episode is energy consumption in computing. My guests are Wim Vanderbauwhede (University of Glasgow, UK) and John Wernvik (Eco Datacentre, Sweden). This is a big subject area and there will be more on this later  this season - so watch out.


Links:

• https://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wim/ Wim's page at Uni Glasgow
• https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aam9744 There is room at the top - paper
• https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.06642 Wim's paper on Frugal computing
  • https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/frugal-computing-developer/ developer perspective on frugal computing
  • https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/frugal-computing-consumer/ consumer perspective
• https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/climate-cost-of-ai-revolution/ an article on the climate costs of AI
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law Moore's "Law" summary
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koomey%27s_law Koomey's "Law" summary
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle Landauer's principle
• https://ecodatacenter.tech Eco Datacentre in Sweden - homepage
• https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ai-data-centers-could-use-more-electricity-than-the-netherlands-by-2027/ John mentioned an article estimating the future energy used with increase of AI/ML
• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435123003653?dgcid=author another article on energy consumption and AI

Get in touch

Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören!

Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt:

• Email mailto:[email protected]
• UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie 
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/  (personal Profile)
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)

This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

So, das ist jetzt die letzte Folge der 6. Serie von Code for Thought und diesmal geht es um Open Science. Mein Gesprächspartner ist Konrad Förstner von der TH Köln, den einige von Euch vielleicht vom Open Science Radio her kennen, das er mit Matthias Fromm schon seit längerer Zeit betreibt. 

Euch Allen ein paar schöne und hoffentlich erholsame Tage. Ich mache eine kleine Pause und es geht dann im Januar 2024 mit der 7. Folge des Podcasts weiter. 

Hier noch ein paar Links zu dieser Folge:

• https://konrad.foerstner.org Konrad's Webseite
• https://www.openscienceradio.org Open Science Radio - das Podcast
• https://sci-hub.st Sci-Hub 
• https://royalsociety.org/about-us/history/ "Nullius in verbia" das Motto der Royal Society das Konrad anspricht. Will soviel heissen wie: traut nicht den Aussagen von anderen (und implizit - traut Euren Daten). 

Get in touch

Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören!

Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt:

• Email mailto:[email protected]
• UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie 
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/  (personal Profile)
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)

This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

In this last (English) episode of Season 6, I'll be talking to Sara Petti and Evgeny Karev from the Open Knowledge Foundation. Sara and Evgeny work on a project called Frictionless Data, which aims to make working with (open) data easier and more seamless. 

Like many organisations around open source and open data they invite contributions from engineers.

Some links for the Open Knowledge Foundation and others mentioned in this episode:

• https://okfn.org Open Knowledge Foundation home page
• https://github.com/okfn GitHub of Open Knowledge Foundation
• https://frictionlessdata.io Homepage of the Frictionless Data project
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CKAN the CKAN project 
• https://csvw.org CSV on the Web
• https://datadryad.org/stash Data Dryad
• https://zenodo.org Zenodo

Get in touch

Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören!

Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt:

• Email mailto:[email protected]
• UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie 
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/  (personal Profile)
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)

This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

I met Ghislain Vaillant for our interview at the Brain Institute at the Pitié Salpetrière Hospital in Paris. Ghislain has an interesting career path that took him from an RSE role in the UK to the private sector and back to academia (in France) again. 
Our conversation touches on differences in RSE roles between countries (e.g. UK/France) and how big events shape our careers. 

Some links:

• https://institutducerveau-icm.org/en/ The Brain Institute
• https://institutducerveau-icm.org/en/team/team-colliot-durrleman/ The team Ghislain has been part of
• https://www.inria.fr/en/aramis The Aramis project
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/ghisvail/ Ghislain's LinkedIn profile

Get in touch

Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören!

Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt:

• Email mailto:[email protected]
• UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie 
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/  (personal Profile)
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)

This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

In this episode of ByteSized RSE I talk about Django, a Python based web development framework that was developed in the mid 2000s. 
My guests are Tom Couch from the University College London and Max Albert from Southampton University.

Links:

• https://www.djangoproject.com the entry point for Django with tutorials and references
• https://www.dj4e.com Django for you tutorial site
• https://www.feldroy.com/books/two-scoops-of-django-3-x the Book Two Scoops of Django by David Greenfeld 
  • https://pydanny.blogspot.com and here is his blog
• https://2024.djangocon.eu If you want to go to a Django conference - here is one...
• https://django-crispy-forms.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ Crispy forms in Django
• https://cookiecutter-django.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ Cookie Cutter Django
• https://medium.com/@devsumitg/how-to-connect-reactjs-django-framework-c5ba268cb8be an article how to connect ReactJS with Django

Trivia

• https://www.holovaty.com Adrian Holovaty gave Django the name - apart from an engineer he is also a talented musician
• https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-history-of-the-Django-web-framework-Why-has-it-been-described-as-developed-in-a-newsroom/answer/Simon-Willison an interview with Simon Willison on how Django got created
• https://simonwillison.net Simon is co-creator of Django 
• https://web.archive.org/web/20140716123229/https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/internals/committers/ a brief history of the first Django committers
• https://archive.org/details/django-reinhardt/107-django_reinhardt-djangos_blues.mp3 The MP3 file of the music played in the episode. 1947, Django Blues by Django Reinhardt 

Byte-sized RSE is presented in collaboration with the UNIVERSE-HPC project.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/computational-methods/rse/events/byte-sized-rse/
ByteSized RSE link to Imperial College

Get in touch

Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören!

Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt:

• Email mailto:[email protected]
• UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie 
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/  (personal Profile)
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)

This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

In the second part of the diversity in the RSE community series, I am talking to Mariann Hardey. Mariann is an associate professor at Advanced Research Computing of the University of Durham, UK. She also published a book called 'The Culture of Women in Tech' in 2020. In our conversation we don't only talk about the barriers women and other underrepresented groups in tech still face, but also what is and can be done about it.

This episode is sponsored by the Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany (Research Centre Jülich) https://www.fz-juelich.de/en 

• https://www.mariannhardey.com Mariann's home page
• The Culture of Women in Tech, Mariann Hardey, Emerald Publishing, 2020: ISBN 978-1-78973-426-3 (print), ISBN 978-1-78973-425-6 (Epub)
• https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01712 Understanding Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Challenges within the Research Software Community, paper Neil Chue Hong, Jeremy Cohen and Caroline Jay

Get in touch

Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören!

Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt:

• Email mailto:[email protected]
• UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie 
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/  (personal Profile)
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)

This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Was alt und gebraucht ist muss nicht immer schlecht sein. So Markus Harrer von der Firma InnoQ. Markus erklärt uns wie man Legacy Software erhalten kann und warum "Boring Software" eigentlich ganz gut ist. Und wenn man schon erneuern muss, sollte man sich über die Vor- und Nachzüge im Klaren sein.
Markus zieht durch die Lande mit Vorträgen und Seminaren. Unten eine kleine Auswahl von Links. 

• Markus Handle auf Mastodon und Twitter is @feststelltaste. Seine Webseite ist https://markusharrer.de 
•  https://tqdev.com/2018-the-boring-software-manifesto The Boring Software Manifesto - mit Links zum z.B. Agile Manifesto
• https://leanpub.com/strategische-spielzuege Ein Buch von Markus (im Entstehen)
• https://www.innoq.com/de/staff/markus-harrer/ Markus bei InnoQ
• https://www.feststelltaste.de/ Blog
  • https://www.feststelltaste.de/top5-legacysystems/ Markus' Top 5 legacy Systeme
  • https://github.com/feststelltaste/awesome-legacy-systems Ein Link zu guten Legacy Systemen
• https://softwareanalytics.de/ Eine Webseite zum Thema Software Analytics
• https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=OND5wuAAAAAJ Markus auf Google Scholar

Get in touch

Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören!

Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt:

• Email mailto:[email protected]
• UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie 
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/  (personal Profile)
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)

This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

I met with Nathan Cassereau and Hatim Bourfoune from IDRIS, a national computing centre for the CNRS (the national research centre in France). Nathan and Hatim work on the Bloom project, an open source large language model, which was created using the Jean-Zay supercomputer. 
Thanks to Nathan and Hatim I had the chance to take a look at the machine after our interview. 
LLMs and AI/ML in general have created a lot of excitement. Hatim said he got into AI/ML himself, and he highlighted a Coursera course run by Andrew Ng. 

Here are a few links:

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.05100 a paper on BLOOM on ArXiv
• https://github.com/ncassereau-idris/lm-evaluation-harness Evaluation of LM 
• https://github.com/dptrsa-300/start_with_bloom Getting started with BLOOM on GitHub
• https://huggingface.co/bigscience/bloom Summary on BLOOM from Huggingface
•  https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/07/12/1055817/inside-a-radical-new-project-to-democratize-ai/ a technology review on BLOOM by MIT
• https://towardsdatascience.com/run-bloom-the-largest-open-access-ai-model-on-your-desktop-computer-f48e1e2a9a32 another BLOOM article
• https://www.youtube.com/@CNRS-FIDLE YouTube channel by CNRS 
• https://github.com/NVIDIA/Megatron-LM Megatron LM library used in the project
• https://github.com/microsoft/DeepSpeed DeepSpeed library used in the project
• https://pytorch.org PyTorch library 
• https://www.genci.fr/en a national infrastructure to provide access to HPC (Grand Equipement National de Calcul Intensif) in France
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Zay brief summary of Jean Zay's life
• http://www.idris.fr/eng/jean-zay/jean-zay-presentation-eng.html The Jean Zay supercomputer at IDRIS/Paris-Saclay 

Get in touch

Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören!

Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt:

• Email mailto:[email protected]
• UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie 
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/  (personal Profile)
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)

This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Finally! After a failed attempt in 2022, I managed to visit Simon Pinches and Olivier Hoenen at ITER this time. ITER is the international thermonuclear energy reactor - and its aim is to build a nuclear fusion reactor that produces a surplus of energy in a sustainable manner. And can be used as a blueprint for future power stations.

Simon and Olivier gave me the grand tour before we sat down and discussed their work. It was a truly impressive tour - in every way. No less impressive is the work that Simon and Olivier are doing on the software side to help put it all together.

Links

• https://www.iter.org the main portal for ITER.
  • https://www.iter.org/mach more details about the ITER tokamak
  • https://www.iter.org/jobs/IPA ITER project associates scheme - as mentioned in the interview
• https://ccfe.ukaea.uk/fusion-energy-record-demonstrates-powerplant-future/ the record breaking JET tokamak in Oxford, UK
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak a good Wikipedia summary of tokamaks

Get in touch

Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören!

Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt:

• Email mailto:[email protected]
• UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie 
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/  (personal Profile)
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)

This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Welcome back to Season 2 of ByteSized RSE, a program supported by Universe-HPC http://www.universe-hpc.ac.uk .
The subject for this session is: Software Estimation and some ideas on how to approach it. 
Things mentioned in this episode:

• The Mythical Man Month, Frederick Brooks, 1975, 
• Software Estimation, Steve McConnell, https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Software_Estimation/U5VCAwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
• https://rclayton.silvrback.com/software-estimation-is-a-losing-game a critical view on software estimation by Richard Clayton
• https://www.stepsize.com/blog/the-best-software-estimation-techniques an overview of some estimation techniques
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_poker The Planning Poker
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-point_estimation 3-point estimation

Byte-sized RSE is presented in collaboration with the UNIVERSE-HPC project.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/computational-methods/rse/events/byte-sized-rse/
ByteSized RSE link to Imperial College

Audio clips:

• Frying sound: https://www.fesliyanstudios.com/royalty-free-sound-effects-download/frying-cooking-food-34
• "Golden Girls" S6E15:  one of the many YouTube videos with Bea Arthur's (aka Dorothy Zbornak) best lines. 

Get in touch

Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören!

Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt:

• Email mailto:[email protected]
• UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie 
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/  (personal Profile)
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)

This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/