Software Carpentry on the NeCTAR Research Cloud

By Damien Irving.

At a typical Software Carpentry bootcamp, participants install the required software on their own laptop (i.e. the bash shell; Python, R or MATLAB; and Git). This solution works OK (we’ve run several bootcamps that way), however participants on older laptops often have trouble getting the software to work, and even if it does work it tends to look and behave a little differently depending on whether the operating system is Windows, Mac or Linux.  

Given these issues, we’re very excited to have just completed our first bootcamp on the NeCTAR Research Cloud. Using the cloud essentially killed two birds with one stone:

  1. Every participant had a working and identical copy of the software, which meant they could focus on learning programming as opposed to wrangling with install issues and operating system discrepancies.
  2. All Australian researchers have access to the NeCTAR Research Cloud, but most don’t even know it. The bootcamp was therefore a great awareness raising exercise.

Our solution to getting tools like the IPython Notebook and R Studio working in the cloud has generated a lot of interest in the Software Carpentry community, so in the coming weeks Tim Dettrick (our lead developer and all round computing guru) will write a post on the topic for the Software Carpentry blog.

If you missed out on attending the bootcamp (there were 49 people on the waiting list!), we have more coming up soon. Alternatively, you can check out the video recording of the bootcamp on the ResBaz YouTube channel.