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TECHNOLOGY FEATURE
13 July 2022
Ex-Google chief’s venture aims to save neglected science software
Schmidt Futures is creating the US$40-million Virtual Institute of Scientific Software to fund the maintenance of researcher-written code.
David Matthews
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Two programmers work at a computer in an office
Scientific research increasingly relies on custom-built software.
See whether this sounds familiar: you build a piece of software to solve a research question. But when you move on to the next project, there’s no one to maintain it. As it ages, it becomes obsolete, and the next academic to tackle a similar problem finds themselves having to reinvent the wheel.
That’s what happened with WaterDetect, a tool for identifying water in satellite images. Mauricio Cordeiro, a geospatial data scientist and programmer at the Laboratoire Géosciences Environnement Toulouse in France, revived the moribund software at the start of his doctoral project, spending some four to six months getting it to work. Now in the final year of his PhD, Cordeiro still devotes considerable energy to the program. But after he graduates, he says he won’t have time to address issues that arise, and there is no one at his laboratory who can take on the project for him. “The problem continues,” he says.
Now, a funding initiative hopes to help ease that burden.
Why science needs more research software engineers
The aim is to overcome a culture of relative neglect in academia for open-source scientific software, Feldman says, adding that support for software engineering is “a line item, just like fuel” at organizations such as NASA. “It’s only in the university research lab environment where this is ancillary,” he says.
Feldman clarifies that engineers will primarily be supporting existing Schmidt Futures researchers who “desperately need good software”, rather than taking on new awardees. But the hope is that they will be able to lend their expertise more broadly.
The institute will initially fund projects at the University of Cambridge, UK; the University of Washington in Seattle; Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland; and the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in Atlanta. It’s still early days, but several software projects are already lined up for support, Feldman says. One involves a data-management system to provide researchers and policymakers with access to confidential government data; another will analyse data from a proposed radio telescope.
At Cambridge, VISS resources will help to rewrite the software behind the Scale Aware Sea Ice Project to better model the impact of climate change on sea ice. Georgia Tech is weighing several projects, including the Virtual Ecological Research Assistant, which simulates ecological changes. Meanwhile, the University of Washington has been “flooded” with requests from researchers there who say they need engineering help, says Sarah Stone, a data scientist at the university who is helping to coordinate its VISS centre. Washington is looking to hire a lead, deputy and five primary software engineers. They will range from graduates fresh out of their undergraduate programmes to multi-year industry veterans.
Closing the gap
Those setting up VISS centres say Schmidt Futures’ steady, relatively long-term funding will help them to overcome a range of problems endemic to academic software. Research grants rarely provide for software development, and when they do, the positions they fund are seldom full-time and long-term. “If you’ve got all of this fractional effort, it’s really hard to hire people and provide them with a real career path,” says Andrew Connolly, an astronomer who is also helping to set up the Washington centre.
What’s more, software engineers tend to be scattered and isolated across a university. “Peer development and peer community is really important to those types of positions,” says Stone. “And that would be extraordinarily rare in academia.” To counter this, VISS centres hope to create cohesive, stable teams that can learn from one another.
Still, there’s a limit to how far Schmidt’s investment can go. Hiring good engineers in places like Seattle and Cambridge is expensive, because universities are competing against the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta. “It’s tricky,” says Chris Edsall, head of research software engineering at the University of Cambridge’s Research Computing Services. “We can’t unfortunately compete on salary.”
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