US Research Software Sustainability Institute
URSSI's mission is to improve the recognition , development, and use of software for a more sustainable research enterprise.
Learn more about our mission and vision
URSSI's mission is to improve the recognition , development, and use of software for a more sustainable research enterprise.
Learn more about our mission and visionKeep up to date with URSSI's new activities
Foundational scientific software tools deliver innovative, yet reliable methods for research across multiple domains. These tools often rely on community expansion by “downstream” libraries to meet domain-specific needs. napari, an open-source, multidimensional imagee viewer for Python, provides core infrastructure for visualizing and annotating scientific imaging data. Its extendable GUI has empowered a diverse ecosystem of over 550 community-developed plugins (i.e., downstream libraries). Since the public announcement of napari in 2019 and the addition of plugin support soon after, collaboration among core contributors, plugin authors, and users has enabled research workflows that no single library could accomplish alone.
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During my Winter 2025 URSSI Early-Career Fellowship project, I researched how modern technologies and tools can assist researchers in easily creating fully reproducible hardware accelerated software environments for scientific and machine learning workflows. I compiled the techniques and best practices I had learned into a short course, which I contributed to The Carpentries Incubator, and then taught this open source educational material to the broader scientific community at workshops.
The material focused on using Pixi — a modern multi-platform software environment manager that builds on the conda and Python package ecosystems — and CUDA conda packages distributed on conda-forge. Pixi is a tool with high-level semantics designed to let users declaratively specify project software requirements and then record the fully resolved (“locked”) dependencies in a “lock file”. Written in Rust, Pixi exploits the language’s speed and technologies to efficiently resolve complex dependency trees and update the project lock file for every Pixi operation that could affect the software environment. This means that that if a Pixi project is version controlled, any state of that project is fully reproducible, byte for byte, indefinitely into the future.
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Stay tuned for upcoming announcements on workshops, training events, conferences and more.
As we get started on the institue, we have launched a series of core projects to improve the sustaniability of research software and the people who produce it.
This EAGER project will investigate the development and maintenance of software produced in research projects funded by the National Science Foundation. The goals of this project are: 1 To understand what factors influence software sustainability by gathering data from grant-funded research projects; 2 To describe current models of sustainability planning and suggest potential new models that could increase the likelihood of achieving long-term software sustainability; and 3 To develop new …
As part of a set of connected activities under the banner of the US Research Software Sustainability Institute, this grant funds an effort by Kyle Niemeyer, Associate Professor of mechanical engineering at Oregon State University, to develop and run four, weeklong “beyond introductory” winter/summer schools for researchers who want to deepen their software engineering skills. Beyond directly training researchers in sustainable software development, Niemeyer will develop, hone, and release a …
Welcome to “Charting the Course: Policy and Planning for Sustainable Research Software,” a Sloan Foundation-funded project dedicated to supporting the future of research software through evidence-informed policy work. This section will help you stay updated with our latest news, research, and community engagement activities.
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