High Level Support Team -Barcelona Supercomputing Center

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) is the leading supercomputing center in Spain. It houses MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, and is a hosting member of the PRACE European distributed supercomputing infrastructure. The mission of BSC is to research, develop and manage information technologies in order to facilitate scientific progress. BSC combines HPC service provision and R&D into both computer and computational science (life, earth and engineering sciences) under one roof, and currently has over 500 staff from 44 countries.
 

Context and Mission

Supercomputers are indispensable tools for solving the most challenging and complex scientific and technological problems through simulations. The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, PRACE, is a unique persistent pan-European Research Infrastructure for High Performance Computing (HPC) and forms the top level of the European HPC ecosystem.

In order for the European scientific communities to fully benefit from the performance of leadership-class Tier-0 systems provided by the PRACE 2 Hosting Members, it is mandatory to provide them support through high-level teams in terms of code enabling and optimization of scientific applications. The following vacancy will be part of the BSC High Level Support Team providing 2nd and 3rd level support to the full PRACE tier-0 community. The team will be composed of 6 people and will comprise different HPC expertise providing specific skills in different domain science. The HLST will work on transverse actions including extreme scalability of select European scientific applications and tools towards Exascale, Data Analytics and Machine learning as well as code refactoring.
 

Key Duties

• Optimize and adapt scientific application codes to PRACE architectures
• Improve the performance of existing parallel codes, improving the serial efficiency and the scalability, changing if necessary the code or helping the developers with their required modifications
• Choose and adapt algorithms and/or mathematical library routines to improve applications to specific computer architectures (accelerators, new programming models, etc)
• Provide consultancy to scientists on new computer architectures and programing models
• Generate performance analysis and benchmarks for selected applications and report the results to the applications developers
• Support to researchers within their work field: Engineering, Chemistry, Biology, Mathematics, etc
• Address scientific user issues resulted of use PRACE Tier-0 systems
• Collaborate with other functional groups within PRACE on technical matters related to supporting scientific application work
• This is not a full definition of the role but covers the main aspects and drivers for success

Deadline

The vacancies will remain open until suitable candidates have been hired. Applications will be regularly reviewed and potential candidates will be contacted, but the interviewing process will be concentrated during September/October 2017.

We are looking for candidates to fill the 6 vacancies, working as team the positions will be more related with the different departments of our Center:

3 in the Operations Department
1 in Computer Science Department
1 in CASE Department
1 in Earth Sciences Department


Conditions

The position will be located at BSC within the Operations Department
We offer a full-time contract, a good working environment, a highly stimulating environment with state-of-the-art infrastructure, flexible hours, extensive training plan, tickets restaurant and a private health insurance
Some travelling must be expected
Duration of the contract: 3 years (extendable)
Starting date: During last quarter 2017 and/or January 2018
 

Applications Procedure

All applications must include:

A motivation letter, including two contacts for further references and the priority of the vacancies interested in (Operations, Computer Science, CASE or Earth Sciences)
A full CV including contact detail