Supporting Plasma Software in the UK

PlasmaFAIR is a new community network of RSEs working in plasma science. Our goal is to improve the quality and sustainability of plasma research software.

Software Sustainability

That the software you use today will be available - and continue to be improved and supported - in the future.

We offer a free health-check of your software, including development effort to implement some of our sustainability and usability recommendations, to ensure that your software can continue to be used for research well into the future. Typically, we offer one-to-two weeks of effort, and don’t offer to implement major features.

Software is Important

The majority of UK research relies on software, and this is especially true in plasma science. From first principles simulations of gyrokinetics, to data analysis of solar observations, via reaction networks of atmospheric plasmas, we all use research software. It’s vital then that this software is reliable, trustworthy, and sustainable.

Software is often overlooked as a research output, but just as publishing a paper can have unexpected impacts in other fields, releasing software can also have impacts in unanticipated places. For example, BOUT++ was originally written for fusion plasmas in tokamaks, but has since been used for a whole host of other applications from space plasmas to chocolate bubbles. Those impacts might never have happened if BOUT++ was closed and inaccessible to other researchers.

Data is Important

Many plasma simulations make use of supercomputers, sometimes using more than ten thousand CPU-hours per run. The data generated from such simulations is expensive – not just in economic cost, but also in terms of CO2 – and is currently only often used once. Publishing our simulation data would allow other researchers to build upon our work, getting secondary use out of our expensively generated datasets.

The FAIR principles

We at PlasmaFAIR think that both software and data deserves to be FAIR:

• Findable: we should be able to search for them using keywords
• Accessible: we should be able to get hold of the code/data, even if it means authentication and authorisation
• Interoperable: data should be stored in common, machine-readable file formats, and software should write to such files
• Reusable: both software and data should be licensed to allow other researchers to build on top of them

You can find out more about the FAIR principles for data at Go FAIR¹

What Are We Doing About It

We think making software and data FAIR is so important that we want to help you improve the FAIRness of your project, whether it’s big or small, ancient Fortran or bleeding-edge Julia, student code or massive team; get in touch and find out how we can help!

How it works

1. Fill in an application form!
2. An RSE from PlasmaFAIR will have an initial health-check discussion with you about your software. This is a pretty informal chat, covering various aspects of both your software and the wider project. We’ll talk about things like version control, testing, and documentation.
3. From the initial discussion, the RSE will draw up a list of recommendations on how to improve the sustainability and usability of your software.
4. Out of this list of recommendations, you and the RSE will decide on some to do as part of the PlasmaFAIR project. We typically expect this project to take one to two weeks, but longer or shorter projects are possible.
5. After finishing the project, the RSE will write up a short report describing the software and the improvements we made. We’d like to make the reports publicly available, and add your software to our directory of plasma research software.

Get Involved

Do you write research software in plasma science? Join PlasmaFAIR and help us improve the plasma software ecosystem, or complete health-checks for your own software and tell us about it (coming soon).

Funding and Support

We receive funding from Peter Hill’s Fellowship, EPSRC Grant EP/V051822/1 “Embedding FAIRness in Plasma Science”