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SHAREing, the UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure project building a national skills hub for accelerated research environments, has opened a call for task suggestions, with a deadline of 22 September 2026. Anyone at a UKRI-eligible institution can put forward an idea, and approved tasks become open, funded pieces of work that the community can then apply to deliver. It’s a quick, low-effort way to get something you need actually built, written or taught, and we’d encourage everyone in the CAKE network to take a look.

How SHAREing’s Flexible Funds work

SHAREing runs its Flexible Funds a little differently from a conventional funding call. Rather than asking you to propose a fully formed project, it splits the process into two stages:

  1. Suggest a task. Anyone in the UK can describe, briefly, a specific piece of work they would like SHAREing to fund. The suggestion is discussed at the next open Work Package meeting, where the community can give feedback and help shape it, and if approved it is published on the SHAREing Task Map as an open task.
  2. Propose a solution. Once tasks are live, people from across UKRI-eligible institutions can propose short projects that address one or more of them. The proposer doesn’t need to be the person who suggested the task.

The effect is a kind of community-wide requirements analysis where the people who know where the gaps are describe them, and the people with the skills to fill them are funded to do so. Tasks are typically quite specific and the resulting projects relatively short, so this is well suited to concrete, bounded pieces of work rather than large research programmes.

What makes a good task suggestion?

The best tasks are the kind of thing you’ve probably muttered “someone should really do that” about before! A few examples of the flavour SHAREing has in mind:

  • “I would like SHAREing to provide funds so that somebody can write an OpenMP tutorial for a Tenstorrent cluster.”
  • “I could really do with a guide for my PhD students on how to find out where their code spends most of its time, and how to speed it up.”
  • “Can somebody provide working instructions for installing a particular visualisation package on my new commodity GPU?”

Suggestions need to fit within one of SHAREing’s active Work Package groups:

  • WP1 Performance Assessment — performance assessment of community codes, assessment methodology, and testbeds
  • WP2 Technical Training — developing e-learning content on accelerated computing that isn’t covered elsewhere, and organising bootcamps, workshops and hackathons
  • WP3 Professional Skills Training — e-learning content and events around the professional skills RTPs need to lead accelerated computing projects

Browsing the Task Map is a good way to connect with the overarching objectives of the project, where current open and in-progress tasks range from benchmarking CASTEP and FLAME GPU on AMD hardware, to using and optimising the Tenstorrent RISC-V system, a practical Lustre installation guide, a Carpentries-style “build your own HPC” course, green software practices on accelerators, and designing RTP learning pathways and micro-credentials. If you’re not sure which Work Package your idea belongs to, SHAREing suggest contacting the relevant lead before submitting.

How to submit and key dates

Full details are on the Suggest a New Task page, and both stages are also listed in our funding opportunities section.

Get involved

The bar for a suggestion is deliberately low and a short description of a specific thing that would make your life, or your community’s life, easier is all that’s needed. If you’ve been putting off writing a tutorial, documenting a setup, or benchmarking a code on new hardware because nobody had the time, this is a chance to get it funded. Please do submit your ideas, and pass this on to colleagues, students and RTP groups who might have gaps of their own to fill.