The Turing and Open Source at FOSDEM’24
David Llewellyn-Jones, Isabel Fenton, Katriona Goldmann, Anne Lee Steele, Jim Madge, Malvika Sharan, Rosie Wood
Open Research is a theme that permeates everyone and everything at The Alan Turing Institute. From promoting Open Research in individual and collaborative research projects through to encouraging wider adoption of Open Research across the data science landscape through The Turing Way, Open Research is important to us. This is underpinned by our stated principles of collaboration and democratising access.
But open, reproducible research requires that the software used is also open to scrutiny and re-use. In the Research Engineering Group we both make use of and contribute to hundreds — probably thousands — of open source projects. Developing and provisioning open source infrastructure are core capabilities necessary for us to achieve our Grand Challenge goals and we have an Open Source Service Area, organised by the Research Engineering Group, especially dedicated to it.
All of these are nice words, but mean nothing if not backed up by work on the ground. That’s why we wanted to both take the opportunity to interact with others in the open source community, and also demonstrate some of the work the Turing has been doing on open source projects, by attending FOSDEM’24.
Each year thousands of committed open source enthusiasts descend on the Université libre de Bruxelles for what has become one of the world’s most important open source events. Called FOSDEM — the Free and Open Source Developers of Europe Meeting — the event hosts hundreds of different open source projects and open source developers from all over the world. There’s no admission fee and no need to register, but the event is hugely popular and a certain amount of chaotic mayhem always ensues.
The event hosts a whole array of different sub-events, including Lightning Talks (32 presentations), a plethora of projects stands (62 projects), two days of developer rooms (67 tracks, 933 speakers) and numerous ad-hoc Birds of a Feather events (who knows?!). All of the talks are recorded and the FOSDEM organisers calculate a total of 393 hours (that’s over 16 days) of presentations were captured.
According to the organisers, FOSDEM is not just the largest open source conference, it’s actually the largest conference on earth, measured by number of talks and parallel tracks.
The Turing has had a presence at FOSDEM for a number of years already, and we were keen to build on this in 2024. In total Turing people were involved with four devrooms, three presentations and one project stand. Work on the event included not just attending on the day, but also planning from a large team from across the Research Engineering Group and the Tools, Practices and Systems Team.
Open Research devroom
After presenting in the Open Research devroom in 2023, Anne Lee Steele and Jim Madge from the Turing were involved in the Open Research room in 2024. Anne was a co-organiser of the room, reviewing applications, moderating questions, and organising the conference schedule for the day. Jim presented a talk about “The Turing Way” infrastructure. This room provided a valuable opportunity to leverage Turing expertise in various aspects of open research and open source software in a diverse conference environment. Members of The Turing Way community also presented at their online devroom on 10 February.
Python devroom
It will come as no surprise that we use a lot of Python at The Alan Turing Institute. Whether it’s scripts to quickly process some data, Jupyter Notebooks to demonstrate data science ideas, or full-blown infrastructure projects, Python is probably our most widely used programming language. So we were keen to contribute to the Python devroom, a full day track of presentations that capture the incredibly breadth and flexibility of the Python language.
While the Python devroom is well established, having been run 13 times and continuously since 2013, this is the first year that the Turing has been officially involved. From our team, Rosie Wood, Jim Madge, and David Llewellyn-Jones all contributed to the running of the devroom by helping share the call for proposals, reviewing the many submissions that came in and then helping with the running and chairing of the room on the day.
Eric Gazoni and Marc-Andre Lemburg who run the devroom describe it as “a mixture of presentations, tutorials, demos, live coding” and “the perfect place to share your story and meet fellow Python enthusiasts.” At the Turing we were very happy to contribute to their efforts, including helping to run and chair the event on the day. Particular highlights of the event for us were Pascal Chambon’s talk on powerful and usable Python cryptography which included a wide array of physical props as well as example code and Tatiana Al-Chueyr’s talk on Data workflows. Both of these talks, along with all the other talks from the day, are available to view.
Contributing to the Python devroom was an amazing experience for us and we’re very keen to continue our involvement in future years.
HPC, Big Data & Data Science devroom
The Research Computing Team, which falls under the Research Engineering Group, is responsible for managing user access to our research Cloud and High Performance Computing infrastructure for researchers across the Turing. While the Turing doesn’t itself run any High Performance Compute hardware, we have partnerships with several UK Tier 2 systems, including Baskerville, JADE and ARCHER, in addition to the Azure cloud. Our researchers make heavy use of High Performance Computing systems for analysing data, training AI models and applying the results.
Jim and David from the Research Compute Team were involved with running the HPC, Big Data & Data Science devroom this year, with pre-event support that included reviewing submissions, as well as giving a presentation in the devroom on the day.
The devroom covers a surprisingly broad set of topics, from efficient database search to deployment and library compatibility. We particularly enjoyed Vanessa Sochat’s presentation on implementing HPC technologies inside of Kubernetes. We were also very happy to give our own presentation on RCTab, the Cloud subscription management tool that has been developed internally at the Turing and which we recently open-sourced.
Involvement in the HPC, Big Data & Data Science devroom is also something we really hope to build on for FOSDEM’25.
Linux on Mobile
The Research Engineering Group supports all of its Research Software Engineers and Research Data Scientists by offering them 10% of their time during which they can undertake self-directed personal development and work on their own projects. This “22-days” scheme results in a wide array of useful outputs that might not otherwise happen.
As part of this we’ve been contributing to the Mobile Linux ecosystem, providing software development and community outreach support, helping to promote the use of Linux as a system on mobile devices. This led to us being involved with the Linux on Mobile stand at FOSDEM that showcased multiple different glibc/bash-based Linux systems that run on mobile devices. Operating systems represented on the stand included Sailfish OS, AsteroidOS, PureOS, NemoMobile, postmarketOS, Ubuntu Touch and Mobian. This also led to a talk by David in the FOSS on Mobile Devices devroom
on the topic of writing a daily dev diary, upgrading embedded gecko, the web rendering engine, for use on mobile devices.
Wrap-up
Once again FOSDEM’24 was both an amazing opportunity and an amazing experience, a chance to underscore our commitment to Open Research and Open Source, and to meet parts of the open source community we might not always get the chance to interact with. We’re looking forward to continuing our involvement with FOSDEM’25, which also happens to be the 25th birthday of the event.
