Philip Fowler

Is software a method?

By Philip Fowler, Software Sustainability Institute Fellow and postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford.

Last month I attended the 59th annual meeting of the US Biophysical Society. It's the sixth time I've been but the first time I've gone really thinking about how our community treats software under my remit as a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow. I was also chosen as a guest blogger and you can see my posts on my blog or on the Biophysical Society blog.

Wait... what is biophysics?

It is the application of physical…

Windows Azure for research training - a perspective

By Philip Fowler, Software Sustainability Institute Fellow and Postdoctoral researcher, University of Oxford.   Windows Azure is a collection of large datacenters scattered around the world (my nearest is in Ireland). By logging into the Azure portal you can spin up websites, virtual machines or even something more sophisticated, like a cloud service, in a matter of minutes. Microsoft use it as their common infrastructure, for example Azure now hosts all the Skype servers.   Anyone, not just Microsoft, can use Azure, although you will need to pay (by the minute as it turns out -…

Crowd-sourced computer networks

By Phil Fowler, Postdoctoral Researcher at  Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford. 

What is crowd-sourcing? Well, it is not a great name, at least for the type of crowd-sourcing I'm going to talk about - is sounds like something a film producer would do. The type of crowd-sourcing I'm interested in harnesses thousands of individual computers to run a series of complicated calculations or simulations. So what types of problems is it used for and where did it come from? 

Crowd-sourcing has its origins in screensavers, such as SETI@home, which…

Hosting a Software Carpentry workshop: top tips

By Philip Fowler, Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford.

This post is based on my experience of organising and hosting the first Software Carpentry workshop at the University of Oxford.

For a workshop to be successful, there has to be one and only one local person who is ultimately responsible for the workshop. A host brings the attendees, the instructors and the helpers together in such a way that things get learnt and everyone enjoys themselves. Being the host sounds kind of glamorous, but really what it means is coming in early on both days to buy the donuts,…

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