Consultancy

NeSI’s Consultancy Service provides scientific and HPC-focused computational and data science support to research projects across a range of domains.

Need support with your research project?

If you would like to learn more about NeSI's Consultancy service and how you can work with NeSI's Research Software Engineers on a project, let's set up an initial meeting. In this meeting we'll discuss your needs and complete a Consultancy application form together.

Request a Consultancy

Note:
Researchers with Merit projects can usually access Consultancy at no cost to themselves, based on their institution's or MBIE's investment into NeSI. Otherwise, please visit the Partners & Pricing page for costs related to our Consultancy service.

What do we do?

The NeSI team are available to help with any stage of your research software development. We can get involved with designing and developing your software from scratch, or assist with improving software you have already written.

An image showing the range of areas covered by our Research Software and Data Science Engineering Consultancy service, from software development to visualisation to performance improvement.
Attribution: 

The service is completely bespoke and tailored to your requirements. Some examples of outcomes we could assist with (this list is general and non-exhaustive):

  • Code development
    • Design and develop research software from scratch
    • Algorithmic improvements
    • Translate Python/R/Matlab code to C/C++/Fortran for faster execution
    • Accelerate code by offloading computations to a GPU
    • Develop visualisation and post-processing tools (GUIs, dashboards, etc)
  • Performance improvement
    • Code optimisation – profile and improve efficiency (speed and memory), IO performance
    • Parallelisation – software (OpenMP, MPI, etc.) and workflow parallelisation
  • Improve software sustainability (version control, testing, continuous integration, etc)
  • Data Science Engineering
    • Optimise numerical performance of machine learning pipelines
    • Conduct an Exploratory Data Analysis
    • Assist with designing and fitting explanatory and predictive models
  • Anything else you can think of ;-)

What can you expect from us?

During a consultancy project we aim to provide:

  • Expertise and advice
  • An agreed timeline to develop or improve a solution (typical projects are of the order of 1 day per week for up to 4 months but this is determined on a case-by-case basis)
  • Training, knowledge transfer and/or capability development
  • A summary document outlining what has been achieved during the project
  • A case study published on our website after the project has been completed, to showcase the work you are doing on NeSI

What is expected of you?

Consultancy projects are intended to be a collaboration and thus some input is required on your part. You should be willing to:

  • Contribute to a case study upon successful completion of the consultancy project
  • Complete a short survey to help us measure the impact of our service
  • Attend regular meetings (usually via video conference)
  • Invest time to answer questions, provide code and data as necessary and make changes to your workflow if needed
  • Acknowledge NeSI in article and code publications that we have contributed to, which could include co-authorship if our contribution is deemed worthy
  • Accept full ownership/maintenance of the work after the project completes (NeSI's involvement in the project is limited to the agreed timeline)

Previous projects

Listed below are some examples of previous projects we have contributed to: