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The Helmholtz Research Software Directory received a major update.

For the second time, the incubator platforms came together to organize a joint education and training event: the Incubator Summer Academy. We can look back on an extensive two-week program that is well worth repeating in 2024.

HIFIS ensures continuous operations of core services by replicating them across multiple centers, providing inherent resilience in a federated environment.

The HIFIS team supervised a bachelor's thesis, aiming at the redesign and implementation of the registration process for User Groups in the Helmholtz AAI.

HIFIS is supporting the newly created pan-European VISA collaboration for the further uptake of a Photon and Neutron-wide data analysis platform.

On October 11-12, we welcomed all HIFIS members and close collaborators to our first full f2f All-hands meeting at HZDR. In the light of the positive decision of the Helmholtz Assembly of Members in September to continue the platforms, we collected numerous new ideas on how we could and should develop HIFIS further.

Public Helmholtz Codebase repositories are archived in the Software Heritage initiative.

Several presentations of HIFIS at this major event together with the Max Planck Society

End of September, Helmholtz decided to continue funding the five incubator platforms until 2029!

HIFIS Events is welcoming its 1000th event!

The registration for the Incubator Summer Academy is open now!

Code for Thought is an RSE podcast and in the latest episode, Uwe Konrad from HIFIS talks about the Helmholtz Software Award

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We’re excited to finally show you what has been in the works for the past few months: a completely redesigned landing page for the Helmholtz Cloud Portal along with a design refresh!

The Scientific Advisory Board 2023 provided again valuable inspiration for the further development of HIFIS.

The HMC conference 2023 wants to provide you with a platform to present your metadata project, to share ideas with the metadata community, to get an insight into recent developments and to network. it will take place 10.-12.10.2023.

With the 13^th Incubator Workshop, all platforms (HIFIS, Helmholtz AI, Helmholtz Imaging, HIDA, HMC) continued to exploit their high creative potential to implement far-reaching benefits for the scientific communities. All experts emphasized the enormous value that the Incubator platforms have for the Helmholtz Association.

Exa-scale storage now available as a service: Check DESY's dCache InfiniteSpace!

The online conference will take place on 07./08.12.2023. The call for abstracts will be open till 13.09.2023.

The Helmholtz Incubator Software Award aims to promote the development of professional and high-quality research software and to recognize the commitment to software as the basis of modern Data Science.

Code for Thought is an RSE podcast and in the latest episode, Fredo Erxleben from HIFIS Education talks about his experience as trainer.

The five Incubator Platforms Helmholtz.AI, Helmholtz Imaging, HIFIS, HIDA and HMC have teamed up again to create an exciting program.

In our fourth HIFIS Cloud team meeting, we identified the milestones to further develop the user experience of the Helmholtz Cloud.

With the Update of Plony, Service Providers can edit Service Information in Plony

There are still open seats in the course "First Steps in Python" on 25 May!

The deRSE unconference has extended its Call for Contributions.

The seminar series takes place on Thursday afternoons and tackles questions in image processing.

A short story about what HIFIS software consulting can help you with.

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Interconnecting cloud services — sometimes dubbed Service Orchestration — allows to automate complex workflows, a precondition to ultimately set up reliable, scalable, reproducible and adaptable data processing pipelines for science. A typical example is to automatically and continuously fetch, move, process, publish and store scientific data, possibly in multiple iterations and for different audiences. We demonstrate our first pilot orchestration of an imaging use case in collaboration with Helmholtz Imaging.

We are happy to announce the general availability of automated dependency update management in the Helmholtz Codebase GitLab. It provides automatic dependency updates in order to keep your software up-to-date and secure.

The Helmholtz Cloud Service Portfolio continues to grow steadily.

HIFIS launches the teaser for the upcoming Helmholtz Research Software Directory.

Join the 2023 _Helmholtz GPU Hackathon_ and give your research software project a performance boost with the help of experienced mentors.

HIFIS-related documents on the Zenodo repository can now be included in our Zenodo Community. Please add yours!

The call for Best Scientific Image 2023 is open. Submit your image(s) for a chance to win Best Scientific Image until Wednesday, 15 March 2023.

We would like to thank all our users, partners and friends for a great cooperation over the last year. We are looking forward to set new milestones and master new challenges together. But for now, we wish you all happy holidays and all the best to you in the year to come!

After three years of ramp-up, HIFIS underwent a thorough evaluation by an international expert commitee. Now, the final results are here: As already indicated, we got a very positive feedback and recommendations to continue our work.

Together with the sister platforms HIDA and Helmholtz AI, HIFIS presented itself on the first EuSSI training bazar — an international event to network with European scientific software training initiatives.

As we could invite neither all HIFIS team members nor all stakeholders to the main review event, we organised an online Post Review Meeting on Friday, 18 November 2022 to keep everyone informed.

On November 11th, 2022, Helmholtz Codebase has been made available under the new domain https://codebase.helmholtz.cloud. The previous domain https://gitlab.hzdr.de redirects to this new domain from now on. Nothing else changes for the users.

deRSE23, the Third Conference for Research Software Engineering in Germany will be held at the Heinz Nixdorf Forum in Paderborn on February 20-21, 2023. The organization is accepting contributions for talks, demos, workshops.

The Service Database Plony becomes the central communication platform between providers of Helmholtz Cloud services and the HIFIS team. Helmholtz Cloud stakeholders and the HIFIS team can now handle key processes seamlessly online, including the onboarding process and the upcoming service review process.

The Ibergrid Conferences focus on exchange on topics related to integrating infrastructures, enabling services for research, and training scientists in the European Open Science Cloud. This post outlines HIFIS's contributions to this year's conference.

The HIFIS Consulting Handbook is NOW publicly available. All information about the consulting process and building your consulting infrastructure can be found there.

The second installment of the TEACH event is going to take place 9 November, 2022, in an online format. The registration is open now.

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The five Incubator platforms Helmholtz AI, Helmholtz Imaging, HIDA, HMC and HIFIS have teamed up to create an exciting program at the Incubator Summer Academy. In this post we take a look back at an intense two-week program.

Within the DataHub of the Research Field Earth & Environment, an Earth Data Portal is being developed. This portal will serve as a central access point for searching and exploring data and thematic ressources from the research field. Missing features and functionalities were identified during a requirement analysis, for which the developers made use of the HIFIS Codebase. This proved to be an efficient workflow that will be further developed and used in similar projects.

Are you looking for talents to fill a data science related position in your group at a Helmholtz Centre? Then join us at our Career Corner to meet motivated data scientists from the Helmholtz Association and our partners on September 22, 2022 from 4-6 PM.

Let's share a comprehensive link list collection of helpful resources for software development.

The goal of DAPHNE4NFDI is to create a comprehensive infrastructure to process research data from large scale photon and neutron infrastructures. A project of this scale needs a reliable infrastructure to ensure communication, data exchange and publishing of the results. Therefore, DAPHNE4NFDI became the second major HIFIS user among the NFDI consortia.

Are you a Helmholtz employee and interested in current developments in the field of research software at the Helmholtz Association? Then save the date: Thursday, November 24, 2022!

Time to celebrate: With the last two centres having joined recently, all 18 Helmholtz Centres and the Head Office are now using the Helmholtz-wide Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure, the Helmholtz AAI!

webODV — Online extraction, analysis and visualization of environmental data. We already introduced the software amongst the “Helmholtz Software Spotlights” series. Now, we are planning to provide private webODV instances as Helmholtz Cloud service, which can be easily accessed online: Users can login via the Helmholtz AAI and will have a workspace to upload private data.

The use of pseudonymized and anonymized patient data in a secure, federated way to better understand, diagnose and treat cancer is the big next step in enhancing the quality of decision making in clinics beyond what current guidelines can offer.

The HIFIS service infrastructure is essential to the CASUS strategy towards data-centric research of complex systems across scientific communities and research fields.

The Helmholtz Cloud Portal just got updated with a new user interface. It has a fresh, clean look, but also introduces new functionalities: keywords, a faceted search and a better mobile view.

HIFIS launches the teaser for the upcoming Helmholtz Research Software Directory.

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The DESY dCache InfiniteSpace service provides seismologists with a repository to share data on earthquakes via SeisBench, a toolbox for machine learning in seismology.

On July 5th and 6th, our 3rd HIFIS Team Meeting took place at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin in Wannsee.

By mid July 2022, we reached 10.000 user registrations in the central instance of the Helmholtz AAI. A good reason to celebrate the success we achieved!

We would be extremely grateful for your participation in the Helmholtz AI community survey 2022! Helmholtz AI has put together a survey to help them determine how they can better serve you, the users.

Registry for the Incubator Summer Academy has opened. Discover workshops from beginner to expert level, a data challenge, lectures and more.

In August 2021, HIFIS started to support PUNCH4NFDI by adapting the Helmholtz AAI to their requirements. Since then, the HIFIS-support for PUNCH4NFDI has been growing into providing an initial set of collaborative tools which can be accessed through the AAI.

The second installment of the TEACH event is going to take place 9 November, 2022, in an online format. The Call for Abstracts is open now.

The workshop "Let's talk FAIR for research software" looked into current practises in RSE and the relation to the FAIR Principles.

The five incubator platforms Helmholtz.AI, Helmholtz Imaging, HIFIS, HIDA and HMC have teamed up to create an exciting program.

HIFIS Technology developed a new online course which will take place for the first time June 14–16, 2022: Continuous Integration in GitLab.

The President of the Helmholtz Association, Mr Otmar Wiestler, invited data science experts and the coordinators from these five platforms to meet in Berlin — for the 12th Helmholtz Incubator Workshop.

HIFIS Education & Training developed a new online course which will take place for the first time May 23–24, 2022: Object-Oriented Programming in Python.

Everyone can vote in the Public Choice Award for the Best Scientific Imaging until Sunday, 29.5.2022.

At the end of April, the Service Canvas in Plony was moved to our production system.

New look and new contents — hifis.net got a makeover to present the Helmholtz digital services.

In January 2022, the first regular Service Portfolio Review started and was completed in March.

This is the report on the proceedings and outcome of the TEACH (Talk About Education across Communities in Helmholtz).

Since January 14^th, 2022, the Mattermost service in the Helmholtz Cloud appears in new splendor equipped with two new main features. Mattermost now comes with channels, boards and playbooks integrated into one single application.

During 2021, HIFIS conducted a survey throughout the Helmholtz Association, querying the needs and current practices of all Helmholtz colleagues in using IT services. The analysis and report are now online.

In the last few weeks, 10 new services were published at Helmholtz Cloud Portal.

The Process Framework for Helmholtz Cloud Service Portfolio is now available in version 1.0!

Helmholtz Software Spotlights

The production version of the Helmholtz Cloud Portal is released and will be continuously developed from now on. With some new features and a stable performance from the beginning, the beta phase can now be finished.

After a brief pitch in the previous meeting, Helmholtz AAI is being presented in full breadth in the 75. DFN Betriebstagung.

The HIFIS Transfer Service (HTS) has been implemented and is in use. Colleagues from HZDR and DESY were among the first to use HTS for the transfer and sharing of Datasets in the context of HelmholtzAI.

HIFIS has been given opportunity to present its scope and status at the Helmholtz Resonator Podcast. This free Podcast focuses on all kinds of research and related activities in Helmholtz.

DESY contributes its Sync & Share Service to the Helmholtz Cloud, for usage by Helmholtz and collaborators! The service, based on Nextcloud Enterprise, is an online storage service, to get easy and fast access to all of your stored data.

We are happy to announce that the Application Form for potential Helmholtz Cloud Services is now online available in Plony!

The Helmholtz AAI supports PUNCH4NFDI by providing AAI components. This offers a working solution on a strongly connected AAI, which follows already the recommendations and guidelines for participating in the EOSC.

We renewed the Helmholtz AAI documentation and provide guidelines and how-to pages for different participants of Helmholtz AAI: Users, Service Providers, Group Managers, etc.

The HIFIS Software Workshop Program for the second half 2021 has been updated.

The Earth and Environment DataHub was one of the first project groups to use nubes as a sync+share service of the Helmholtz Cloud. Since then, the number of user groups has been growing steadily.

Pictured tutorial on usage of Helmholtz AAI login and registration procedures for Helmholtz Cloud Services, using the HIFIS Events Management Platform at events.hifis.net as an example.

Recently, the Helmholtz-wide software development platform (Gitlab) has been extended with the ability to create diagrams from textual descriptions. This post will help you getting started with this new feature.

At the workshop Policies for Research Software held on May 6, 2021, over 100 participants from Helmholtz centers showed great interest. A productive exchange of ideas following Wolfgang Marquardt's welcoming address and the keynote speeches in four Zoom breakout sessions was initiated.

The HIFIS pages have been re-united! Yay! After some time of living separately, the former software.hifis.net and hifis.net homepages have been merged to one, as they should be. All HIFIS services - covering software, cloud, backbone and overarching services, are now being presented on one unified page. Check it out!

The HIFIS Transfer Service (HTS) enables the Helmholtz centres to easily share large data set in collaborations.

Last year we introduced a rough-and-ready solution to offer event management solutions via Indico. Now we can finally introduce you to the shiny new HIFIS Events service with Helmholtz AAI connectivity.

Helmholtz AAI is briefly pitched in the 74. DFN Betriebstagung.

The first Helmholtz Cloud services have been published and are accessible via the new Cloud Portal. Check out the new services! More services will be integrated soon.

Data from 467 respondents of the HIFIS Survey 2020 were analyzed to give an overview of research software developers at Helmholtz and their day-to-day work. While software development plays a crucial role in all six research domains, only about half of the respondents are satisfied with the support at their centers. Results of this survey will help us to better understand how HIFIS Software Services could improve this situation.

Helmholtz AAI is briefly pitched in the 74. DFN Betriebstagung.

The Helmholtz AAI supports the usage of multiple namespaces in entitlements. For now, VO membership information can be created using different namespaces.

The HIFIS Software team is happy to announce the general availability of the Helmholtz GitLab which can be used free-of-charge by anybody within Helmholtz and their partners. It is hosted by HIFIS Software entirely on HZDR servers.

16 of 18 Helmholtz centres plus Head Office meanwhile have an IdP in Helmholtz AAI and thus joined the big EduGAIN community.

Helmholtz AAI has now more than 1000 registered users. Welcome!

Data from 467 respondents of the HIFIS Survey 2020 were analyzed to give an overview of research software developers at Helmholtz and their day-to-day work. While software development plays a crucial role in all six research domains, only about half of the respondents are satisfied with the support at their centers. Results of this survey will help us to better understand how HIFIS Software Services could improve this situation.

In the constituting General Assembly of the EOSC association, the first President and Directors have been elected.

Introduction

The HIFIS Software survey gathered information from Helmholtz research groups about their development practice. This post shows some insights from a technology perspective and tries to make some conclusions for the future direction of HIFIS Software technology services.

Introduction

In the beginning of 2020 the HIFIS team conducted a survey among Helmholtz scientists with the goals of learning more about the current practices concerning research software development and identifying future challenges.

The Helmholtz AAI polcies have been finalised and approved by the HIFIS Coordination Board.

On Wednesday 21st and Thursday 22nd October 2020, the second All-Hands HIFIS Meeting took place. It was carried out as a "two-day online video conference". Numerous members from all Helmholtz institutions were presented with a tightly planned and informative lecture programme. We provide materials and links to all aspects of HIFIS.

Update: From Oct 21 (13:30) until Oct 22 (13:00 max.), we are going to hold our second all-HIFIS meeting. Click here for the Indico page. Over the course of two half days, we will report on the progress of HIFIS, discuss ongoing work packages and also seek to incorporate new ideas, thoughts and queries from non-HIFIS colleagues in Helmholtz.

The selection process for the initial Helmholtz Cloud service portfolio has been successfully completed.

At the end of this process, 38 services offered by nine Helmholtz Centers were selected. Considering that some services are provided by several centers, the initial service portfolio includes 21 different services.

The final part in the "Getting Started with Docker" series: Having explored how to use Docker in a general sense, we will look at how Docker can be used practically in your day-to-day scientific work.

Previously, we learned about Docker, and how to run other people's Docker containers. In this post, we will explore building our own images to package up our projects.

Understanding Docker probably won't solve all of your problems, but it can be a really useful tool when trying to build reproducible software that will run almost anywhere. In this series of blog posts, we will explore how to setup and use Docker for scientific applications.

Homepage and Documentation

The HIFIS homepage as well as the HIFIS Documentation have been restructured and relaunched.

The new workflow uses best-practices continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflow to streamline collaborative contribution to the homepage and the documentation.

Coordinated by DESY, HIFIS fostered a service agreement with the German National Research and Education Network (DFN) on operating a a Helmholtz-wide Virtual Private Network (Helmholtz Backbone). The VPN shall cover the majority of Helmholtz centres.

HIFIS Software Consulting Services offers free-of-charge consulting services to all research groups within the Helmholtz umbrella. Find out what that means, and how you can get software support for your project.

Starting with over 100 services as candidates for the upcoming Helmholtz Cloud, we had to define transparent and objective criteria to make the services comparable. We established a service selection process consisting of three iterations to shrink the service candidate list to a handable size. Now we are conducting the 3rd and last iteration of the service selection in which each remaining service is documented with detailed information. Using this information the final score of each service can be calculated. The score will give priority on which services will be integrated into Helmholtz Cloud first.

The German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) builds a platform collecting methodologies and results of coronavirus antibody studies. In cooperation with HIFIS and led by scientists at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI), the project “LEOSS.sero-survey” is being implemented.

Two of our fellow Helmholtz Incubator platforms (HMC and HIP) recently announced their project calls. Make sure to not miss the respective deadlines in September and October!

The blueprint for the new official Helmholtz-wide Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure (Helmholtz AAI), derived from former HDF AAI, is now online and available for services and identity providers via login.helmholtz.de and the respective development instance. It was drafted by FZJ and KIT, and is compatible to the AARC blueprint.

Am KIT wurde ein superschnelles Computersystem für Hemholtz Artificial Intelligence (AI) Forschung installiert. Dies ist der erste Standort in Europa, an dem das mit InfiniBand verbundene NVIDIA DGX A100 AI-System in Betrieb genommen wurde, finanziert aus der Helmholtz AI Computing Resources Initiative (HAICORE). Der gemeinsame Zugang zu diesen Kapazitäten wird über den von HIFIS angebotenen AAI-Dienst hergestellt.

A super-fast computer system dedicated to Helmholtz artificial intelligence (AI) research has been installed at KIT. This is the first location in Europe to put the InfiniBand connected NVIDIA DGX A100 AI system into operation, funded from the Helmholtz AI Computing Resources Initiative (HAICORE). Common access to these capacities is established using the AAI service offered by HIFIS.

You are the one in charge of taking the notes - quick and precise, with additions from, and the consent of, all participants - and you are in charge of making actionable notes available for everyone immediately after the meeting. However, being in charge does not mean that you have to work out the notes alone. Instead, all participants are invited - or better even, obliged - to not only follow the note taking directly but also to contribute when misunderstandings, misinterpretations, delays in record keeping and other obstacles hinder the success of a joint meeting.

The first HIFIS Hacky Hour was held online at jitsi. Here we give an overview from the organizers point of view.

Helmholtz Federated IT Services - Promoting IT based science at all levels, so lautet der Titel unseres Artikels, der im Newsletter unserer Freunde von der EGI-Foundation erschienen ist. In dem EGI-Newsletter geben wir einen Überblick über die neue HIFIS-Plattform.

Helmholtz Federated IT Services - Promoting IT based science at all levels, is the title of our article that appeared in the newsletter of our friends from the EGI Federation. In the EGI Newsletters, we give an overview of the new HIFIS platform.

We are happy to announce the launch of the HIFIS Software Helpdesk - the place where your user requests for HIFIS Software Services are handled by our distributed team.

In April, the HIFIS SAB held its first meeting as a video conference. Members of SAB compiled a comprehensive feedback report.

You are the one in charge of making this call a success by means of that everyone is happy with a smooth performance of the call itself and is satisfied with the outcome, preferably actionable results having a practical value. Using a video conferencing tool shall not hamper an effective meeting and should be used to make the virtual get-together as efficient as possible when participants are not at the same place.

Whenever you choose and set up a chat system you should as well implement a netiquette and best practices for you and your team members from the start.

In March the first machine learning hackathon was held at GFZ Potsdam. Here I give an overview from the organizers point of view.

It was supposed to be our first Software Carpentries workshop at the HZDR. We were in full swing organizing a live event until it became clear that we would have to move online. Challenge accepted!

Git is cryptographically secure, but it is not foolproof. To verify that work taken from the internet is from a trusted source, Git provides a way to sign and verify work using X509 certificates. This guide will show you how to setup signing of Git commits for the operating system of your choice.

HIFIS workshop cluster in spring and autumn 2020: Basic Software Carpentry, Introduction to GitLab and Bring Your Own Script. Specialized workshops are being planned: Catch them all by keeping an eye on our events page!

The Helmholtz platform HIFIS, the HZDR and the Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS) support the world-wide project Folding@Home in developing an antibody based therapy to prevent a respiratory infection by the virus.

Since end of March, the Grid Computing Centre Karlsruhe and the HPC systems of KIT support the distributed computing projects Folding@Home and Rosetta@home, helping to improve the understanding of proteins, including those of SARS-CoV-2.

The Jülich Supercomputing Center (JSC) offers computing time and support on its HPC facilities for research on the COVID-19 virus.

HIFIS workshop cluster in spring and autumn 2020: Basic Software Carpentry, Introduction to GitLab and Bring Your Own Script. Specialized workshops are being planned: Catch them all by keeping an eye on our events page!

In a joint effort of the Task Group Research Software within the scope of the Helmholtz Open Science Office a software policy template was created.

This model policy should serve as a guideline and reusable blueprint for the creation of regulations for a sustainable use and development of research software in the individual Helmholtz centers.

Want to contribute? No time to read long tutorials? Then this contribution quickstart guide is for you.

We are very happy to announce the initial release of software.hifis.net: the central platform for distributing information, promoting events and offering tutorials and content concerning scientific software development within Helmholtz.

In November the first HIFIS related Software Carpentry Workshop was held. How hard could it be?

Nice project web page, how can I contribute with my own blog post? This is what this blog post is about. I will explain the workflow of “how to create a new blog post” and thereby illustrate how to use the tools Git, GitLab and Jekyll for these purposes.

This post will give you an overview of all the features you can use in your very own HIFIS Software blog post.