Blog Posts

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Service spotlight: Resource Entitlement Management (REMS) by DKFZ

Resource Entitlement Management System (REMS) is an open source tool for managing access rights to different kinds of resources. REMS enables users to apply for access rights easily and offers a secure way for the data owners to manage access to their data.
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Helmholtz RSD improved

The Helmholtz RSD has received an update with new exciting features.
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Helmholtz Foundation Model Initiative call out!

The Helmholtz Association has launched an ambitious initiative to harness the recent advancements in AI and the rise of "Foundation Models".
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HIFIS at HMC Dialog

As a first in the series of incubator meetings, HMC met HIFIS for a privileged dialogue to know each other better.
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Prototype implementation of the NEST Desktop

The open source NEST desktop from E-BRAINS can now run on Helmholtz Cloud infrastrusture, eliminating the need for programming skills and complex installations, and providing a user-friendly experience through a GUI accessible in a web browser.
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Better Coding: some starting points

Get familiar with famous coding tricks from the literature - presented to you by our RSE experts.
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Looking back at the Incubator Summer Academy 2023

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.
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Resilience of HIFIS Core Services

HIFIS ensures continuous operations of core services by replicating them across multiple centers, providing inherent resilience in a federated environment.
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Bachelor Thesis to improve Helmholtz AAI Processes

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.
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HIFIS supporting the VISA Collaboration

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

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.
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HIFIS at the IT4Science Days 2023

Several presentations of HIFIS at this major event together with the Max Planck Society
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HIFIS funding guaranteed until 2029

End of September, Helmholtz decided to continue funding the five incubator platforms until 2029!
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A Podcast about the new Software Award

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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New Helmholtz Cloud Landing Page

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!
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HMC Conference: Call for Abstracts is open

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.
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Helmholtz Incubator Workshop 2023 in Berlin

With the 13th 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.
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TEACH 3: Call for Abstract is open

The online conference will take place on 07./08.12.2023. The call for abstracts will be open till 13.09.2023.
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Apply for the first Helmholtz Incubator Software Award

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.
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A Podcast about HIFIS Education

Code for Thought is an RSE podcast and in the latest episode, Fredo Erxleben from HIFIS Education talks about his experience as trainer.
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Insights from the Cloud Team Meeting 2023

In our fourth HIFIS Cloud team meeting, we identified the milestones to further develop the user experience of the Helmholtz Cloud.
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Six Main Tasks in Image Processing

The seminar series takes place on Thursday afternoons and tackles questions in image processing.
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A Consulting Success Story

A short story about what HIFIS software consulting can help you with.
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Cloud Service Orchestration for Helmholtz Imaging

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.
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Join the Helmholtz GPU Hackathon!

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

HIFIS-related documents on the Zenodo repository can now be included in our Zenodo Community. Please add yours!
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Happy holidays and all the best to you!

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!
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HIFIS Evaluation: First feedback (updated)

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.
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HIFIS at the EuSSI training bazar

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.
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HIFIS Post Review Meeting

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.
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deRSE23 Conference: Call for Contributions

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.
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Plony, the service database, becomes the central interface

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.
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HIFIS at the IBERGRID 2022 conference

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.
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HIFIS Consulting Handbook is online

The HIFIS Consulting Handbook is NOW publicly available. All information about the consulting process and building your consulting infrastructure can be found there.
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TEACH 2 conference: Registration is open

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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Looking back at the Incubator Summer Academy

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.
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Gitlab for Require­ments analysis at Earth Data Portal

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.
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Meet data science talents at the career corner on Thursday

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.
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Awesome list of Useful Links

Let's share a comprehensive link list collection of helpful resources for software development.
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HIFIS supports DAPHNE4NFDI

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.
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3rd Helmholtz Forum: Research Software

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!
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All Helmholtz Centres have now joined the AAI

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!
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Ocean Data View (webODV): Soon in Helmholtz Cloud

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.
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AI Research in Health Topics at CASUS

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.
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CASUS uses HIFIS services for data-centric research

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

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.
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HIFIS has a newsletter!

Subscribe to our newsletter to get the second edition in october!
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Mass Storage for Machine Learning in Seismology

The DESY dCache InfiniteSpace service provides seismologists with a repository to share data on earthquakes via SeisBench, a toolbox for machine learning in seismology.
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We welcome 10.000 Helmholtz AAI Users!

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!
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Helmholtz AI needs YOU for their survey!

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.
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Register for the Incubator Summer Academy

Registry for the Incubator Summer Academy has opened. Discover workshops from beginner to expert level, a data challenge, lectures and more.
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HIFIS supports PUNCH4NFDI (updated)

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.
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Call for Abstracts for TEACH 2 is open

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.
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Recap: Workshop on RSE and FAIR at SE2022

The workshop "Let's talk FAIR for research software" looked into current practises in RSE and the relation to the FAIR Principles.
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Insights from the 12th Incubator workshop

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.
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New HIFIS course: Introduction to OOP in Python

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.
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HIFIS website just got relaunched!

New look and new contents — hifis.net got a makeover to present the Helmholtz digital services.
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Report on the TEACH Conference in 2021

This is the report on the proceedings and outcome of the TEACH (Talk About Education across Communities in Helmholtz).
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Mattermost Major Release 6 available

Since January 14th, 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.
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HIFIS Survey 2021 Report

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.
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Release of Helmholtz Cloud Portal

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.
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HIFIS Transfer Service (updated)

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.
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DESY Sync & Share service available to 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.
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Helmholtz AAI supports PUNCH4NFDI

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.
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The Earth and Environment DataHub use nubes

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.
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Easy Diagram creation in Gitlab

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.
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Policies for Research Software

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.
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HIFIS Homepages unified

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!
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Announcing the HIFIS Event Management Service

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.
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Results of the first Software Survey

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.
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Support of multiple namespaces in entitlement

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

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.
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HIFIS Survey 2020: A Community Perspective

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.

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HIFIS Survey 2020: A Technology Perspective

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.
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HIFIS Survey 2020: Programming, CI and VCS

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.

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HIFIS Annual Meeting 2020: Wrap-up and materials

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.
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Preparing HIFIS Annual Meeting Oct 21-22 - Schedule and Registration

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.
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Selected Services for Initial Helmholtz Cloud Service Portfolio

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.

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Docker for Science (Part 3)

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.
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Docker for Science (Part 2)

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.
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Docker For Science (Part 1)

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.
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HIFIS Pages and Helpdesk launched

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.

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Start of Helmholtz VPN

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.

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Introducing: Consulting Services

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.
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Last steps towards initial service portfolio

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.

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Project Calls for HIP and HMC

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!

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Superschnelles AI-Rechensystem für HAICORE

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.

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Super-fast AI Computing System for HAICORE

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.

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Guidelines for Collaborative Notetaking

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.
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Coding, Cookies, COVID-19

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

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.

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HIFIS in the EGI newsletters

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.

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HIFIS Software Helpdesk launched

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.
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Guidelines for Video Conferencing

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.
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Guidelines for Chatting

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.
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Our First Online SWC Workshop

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!
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S/MIME Signing Git Commits

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.
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HIFIS Software Workshops in 2020

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!
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Folding@Home and research on SARS-CoV-2

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.

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KIT supports distributed protein computing projects

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.
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Overview of HIFIS Workshops in 2020

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!
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The Software Policy Template

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.

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Contributing in 4 Simple Steps

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

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.
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SWC workshop at GFZ-Potsdam

In November the first HIFIS related Software Carpentry Workshop was held. How hard could it be?
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How to Create a New Blog Post?

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.
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Example Blog Post Template

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