CANARIE's research software development team program goes national

Research software is an increasingly critical part of the discovery process today. Now, a new national program is funding the creation of six local teams across the country—from Simon Fraser University to Université Laval—to focus exclusively on research software development.

CANARIE, a non-profit organization that supports digital infrastructure for the research, education and innovation communities, has committed $3.6 million to fund small, dedicated teams of full-time developers that will fulfill a similar function as an IT department but for research software. The developers will collaborate with researchers to create new tools or adapt existing ones to advance discovery in all disciplines.

“It is clear that for many fields having the right software tools available is vital for really understanding what the data are, revealing patterns in them and showing what’s possible,” said Dr. Ranil Sonnadara (PhD), special advisor to the Vice President, Research and executive director of research and high-performance computing at McMaster University. 

The purpose of the funding is to improve the quality and reusability of research software through the use of best practices in software engineering and to promote the reuse of existing software.

“Having local research software support teams allows code to be developed in a way that is sustainable and generalizable so that the same set of code may be able to solve a whole bunch of different problems, sometimes across research domains and fields,” said Sonnadara.

“The program is highly focused on reuse,” said Scott Henwood, director of research software at CANARIE, in an interview with Research Money. At institutions where CANARIE has been piloting the program over the past two years, he said, “we've even asked them to track the number of person days they've saved by reusing software that would typically only be known by a research software developer."

Huge demand for research software support

McMaster has been participating in a pilot, launched by CANARIE in 2018, to test whether the local research software development model would work in Canada. The model was developed in the United Kingdom and has been adopted by many other countries.

In a 2017 survey, conducted by the UK Software Sustainability Institute (UK SSI), an international leader in research software, 70 percent of researchers said they couldn't do their research without software support.

Often, however, researchers do not have the resources to manage software development teams or are unaware of existing research software that could be adapted to meet their needs. 

That is particularly true of two groups of researchers, according to Henwood. The first is researchers who are moving into big data and require a larger software system; the second, larger group, is comprised of researchers who need smaller components, or individual software programs. “There isn’t really a place for them to go to get that kind of help,” he said. 

Sonnadara agreed, noting that a group of researchers who fall between big users and very small users of research software are struggling to find access to the resources that they need. Many of those researchers are in the social sciences and humanities, where demand for research software support is increasing. 

CANARIE's pilot demonstrated the demand for local research software support is huge. 

“All the Canadian teams have been oversubscribed from day one, to the point where they actually have to do internal calls for proposals to figure out who they can support,” said Henwood.

Sonnadara said over two years, McMaster's pilot has supported 13 researchers and about 50 graduate students. But dozens more researchers sought the team's support. “I would say we've had at least a five-fold demand over the resources that are available, probably more like an order of magnitude,” he said. 

All three pilots — McMaster’s, as well as teams at the University of Regina and Carleton — have secured funding from new sources to continue their work. 

The new teams will be funded by CANARIE through March 2023.

Over the next two and half years, Henwood said his priority is to connect the teams “to start the seeds of a national group of dedicated research software developers.”

CANARIE’s research software programs will eventually transition to Canada’s new National Digital Research Infrastructure Organization (NDRIO), which is working on a current state and needs assessment now, according to Henwood. 

Research software, research data management and research computing are all linked, said Sonnadara: “It’s a cohesive ecosystem. It's exciting that ISED has seen this and has started funding everything collectively.”

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