Event

CANARIE Research Software Consultation

Thursday, June 23, 2016 12:00to13:30
James Administration Building Room 302, 845 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3A 2T7, CA
Price: 
Free

CANARIE and McGill University Office of Research and Innovation invite you to share your perspective on the development and use of reusable research software tools.

CANARIE designs and delivers digital infrastructure, and drives its adoption for Canada’s research, education and innovation communities. CANARIE keeps Canada at the forefront of digital research and innovation, fundamental to a vibrant digital economy.

For the past decade, CANARIE has been funding researchers to develop research platforms. Research platforms are typically large, custom software systems that support most or all of the research workflow.  Early in the program it became apparent that regardless of discipline, these platforms had significant commonality. In order to leverage this commonality to reduce software development time and accelerate research, CANARIE began to fund software services. Service are smaller, re-useable software components that contribute one piece of functionality to a research platform. Research platforms can be built faster as using previously developed services turns time-consuming software development tasks into shorter software integration efforts.

But there’s a problem. Although the service model makes research platform development more efficient, there are still too many new research platforms being created. There is still duplication of functionality in areas that are not covered by the service library and more platforms means more spent on maintenance and less funding available to support new research.

This is where you come in. CANARIE is exploring ways to evolve the program to support more platform-level reuse, including cross-discipline re-use, and we’d like your opinion. We want to make sure the program meets the needs of Canadian researchers.  For discussion:

Direct Platform Re-use Model

  • CANARIE would fund those with access to software research platforms to make those platforms re-useable by others.
  • Who would contribute a re-useable platform? Would it make more sense for faculty from Computer Science/Software Engineering departments to maintain research platforms on behalf of others?
  • What would be the incentive(s) for platform contributors?
  • How would potential new users be identified?

Research Software Institute Model

  • CANARIE funds a team of research software experts to work with researchers developing custom software.
  • Software re-use would be accomplished through the knowledge of different projects gained by this team.

Guest speaker: Scott Henwood, Director, Research Software, CANARIE

A light lunch and refreshments will be served. 

Please RSVP to linda [dot] rice [at] mcgill [dot] ca

 

 

 

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