Senior Storage Team Leader

A new and exciting opportunity has arisen for an enthusiastic and highly motivated Team Leader to join the University’s Advanced Computing Research Centre (ACRC), one of the UK’s leading High Performance Computing (HPC) and Research Data Storage (RDS) providers.  The University’s latest HPC cluster contains more than 15,000 compute cores and provides over 800 TFlops.  This computing power is coupled to a multi-petabyte, highly-resilient and highly-available storage facility serving thousands of users.

 

The role holder will be at the forefront of bringing innovative and highly performant storage solutions to a large and vibrant community of researchers.  The ideal candidate for this role will combine an appetite for new technology and innovation with system development and planning together with problem solving, strong user support ethos and excellent communication skills.  The role holder will lead a team of Systems Administrators, Data Specialists and Research Software Engineers who support the administration and operation of high performance parallel file systems and the development of innovative data sharing facilities.

 

The role holder will support a wide variety of researchers and workflows and will have the opportunity to engage with many cutting-edge storage technologies.  The role holder will lead in the innovation and strategy to support the growing research data storage requirements of the University and of the HPC facility. They lead the storage team within the ACRC and are responsible for day to day management of the team and the operation of the RDS and its supporting infrastructure.

 

The RDS uses IBM’s Spectrum Scale parallel file system backed by several petabytes of disk and SSD storage.  An innovative Hierarchical Storage Management system couples this to tens of petabytes of tape storage.  The backend storage libraries and arrays are connected by a Fibre Channel SAN to highly available cluster of servers providing network attached storage to over 2,000 users.  The RDS is far from static and we are currently investigating the use of new SSD-based caching technologies along with bespoke data migration and placement policies. Looking ahead, we are planning for the next 20 years of data storage, the role holder playing a major part in the development of the next generation of our storage facility.

 

For informal enquiries please contact either Simon Burbidge (simon.burbidge@bristol.ac.uk) or Caroline Gardiner (Caroline.Gardiner@bristol.ac.uk).

 

The University is committed to creating and sustaining a fully inclusive culture.  We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and communities.