Software Carpentry, the NeCTAR Research Cloud and official Masters coursework

By Damien Irving.

This time last year we introduced you to the team of geophysicists behind Underworld, which is a computer model that simulates the movement of continents (i.e. plate tectonics). Every year Masters students in the School of Earth Sciences are required to take a number of one-week courses offered by the Victorian Institute of Earth and Planetary Sciences (VIEPS), so Professor Moresi and his team offered an Underworld VIEPS course for the first time in 2014. Their model has a Python front-end, so we offered to help out by delivering a half-day introduction to Python at the beginning of the week.


Upon reviewing the 2014 course, Professor Moresi found that in order to use the Underworld model more effectively, his students would require a stronger grounding in the fundamentals of Python programming. To address this issue, an “Introduction to Python” course was added to the VIEPS schedule for 2015. We helped out by running the first two days of that course as a regular Software Carpentry workshop, and then for the remainder of the week the students applied their newly acquired Software Carpentry skills to typical Earth Sciences problems (e.g. analysing and plotting seismic data). This introductory course was set as a prerequisite for the Underworld VIEPS course, which was held two weeks later.


In the lead up to the Underworld VIEPS course, we also worked with Professor Moresi and his team to make the Underworld model available on the NeCTAR Research Cloud via resbaz.cloud.edu.au (which is powered by our DIT4C engine). This ensured a seamless student experience with zero software installation issues, which made life much easier for the workshop instructors. We are now in discussions with other researcher groups about improving the accessibility of their software via the NeCTAR Research Cloud / resbaz.cloud.edu.au, so please do get in touch if you think this approach might work for you!