PlasmaFAIR: Making Plasma Software Better

PlasmaFAIR is a project aiming to improve the quality, ease-of-use, and sustainability of plasma software across the whole community by providing free research software engineering support to researchers at all career stages. We assess projects by performing software “health checks”, making recommendations to the authors, and helping implement the most impactful changes. Our work often includes adding testing and documentation, setting up continuous integration and automation, and packaging projects for smooth and easy distribution.

Many of our projects are helping researchers transition from single-use codes, often written during their PhDs, to more general purpose research software. For example, Scotty, a beam tracer for tokamak back-scatter doppler diagnostics, was initially written as a collection of Python scripts for a PhD project at the University of York and UKAEA. With the help of our support, it is now a much more robust research software package, used by multiple groups around the world.

We provide longer-term support for some projects, such as Pyrokinetics, a common interface for gyrokinetic codes which enables easier cross-code comparisons. We have been involved since the beginning, helping to ensure that the package is able to meet researchers’ needs while staying maintainable and sustainable. Pyrokinetics is now a widely used community tool.

We’re also continually involved in the wider open-source community, contributing bugfixes, performance improvements, and new features to projects such as netCDF, FAIRDataPipeline, and fortranformat. Our latest community tool is fortitude, a very fast Fortran linter.

Repository¶

https://plasmafair.github.io