The 2023 ICCS Summer School was a success
The 2023 ICCS Summer School was a success
This July, the Institute of Computing for Climate Science hosted its second annual summer school in the vibrant city of Cambridge, a place that has been a focal point of learning and discovery for over 800 years. Members of the VESRI and VISS communities were invited to attend a variety of technical training sessions, workshops as well as present their own research to others. Talks ranged from reducing uncertainty in climate models to using machine learning to emulate sea ice processes. Alongside these sessions, participants enjoyed various networking opportunities such as formal dinners and a punting tour of the University colleges.
The summer school brought together climate scientists and software engineers in order to strengthen current ties and forge new collaborations, all in the pursuit of advancing climate modelling. We brought attention to fusing best practices in software engineering to ensure accessibility and encourage collaboration for high fidelity and reproducible climate models.
Participants particularly enjoyed the Hackathon event. Teams of three to five people worked together on a project of their choosing. Senior research software engineer, Dr Tom Meltzer shares his take on the experience:
The hackathon was a fantastic opportunity to learn more about the ICCS projects and experiment with those "wouldn't it be cool if we added X" features that don't necessarily get the development time they deserve. In just a short time, we managed to accelerate a small subsection of the code using ‘numba cuda’. This proof-of-concept implementation has now formed the foundations of a larger project to accelerate the rest of the code base. It was a great learning experience and it's amazing to see how much can be done in under a day's work.
Dr Daniel Lee, Senior Program Scientist at Schmidt Futures, our funding partner, looks forward to “our continued partnership to reimagine how science is done, to develop new lines of code and software, and to grow a scientific culture of change that is much bigger than one person alone.” The 2023 summer school was a great success and ICCS anticipates hosting many future events to come.