Sr High Performance Computing Specialist

Department: IT Academic & Research Technologies
Division: Information Technology (NUIT)
Requisition #: 13967
Location: Evanston
Full Time Percent: 100.00
Grade: ITS / 80
Salary: TBD

Job Summary

Under minimal direction, the Senior High Performance Computing (HPC) Specialist is responsible for assisting Northwestern's research faculty to develop new scalable algorithms, tune, debug, optimize, re-architect, and enhance their existing algorithms on High Performance Computing and Shared Memory systems available locally at Northwestern and available at other institutions.  In addition, the Senior HPC specialist leads training and development events for Northwestern researchers and graduate students on software porting techniques, parallelization and optimization methodologies, and data management.

Specific Responsibilities:

• Providing technical support and assistance developing, tuning, debugging, optimizing, re-architecting, and enhancing researcher algorithms on Northwestern High Performance Computing and Shared Memory systems;
  
• Providing a comprehensive support program for the Northwestern research faculty;
  
• Defining software and application requirements for coding projects;
  
• Verifying installation and functionality of software and applications on HPC systems; 
  
• Aiding in defining the requirements of future HPC systems architectures and configurations;
  
• Providing technical support and assistance developing, debugging, parallelizing, porting, tuning, optimizing, re-architecting, and enhancing Research Faculty codes on External HPC and SMP Systems available at other Universities, National HPC Centers, and Government Labs;
  
• Representing the department at campus meetings, internal IT meetings, meetings with senior administrators, or workshops to NU researchers;
  
• Representing Northwestern research computing efforts at conferences and meetings;
  
• Developing and conducting workshops for the education of Northwestern faculty and graduate students in the area of high performance computing technologies and development;
  
• Writing grant proposals (with faculty or with NUIT Directors) for external funding for NU HPC initiatives;
  
• Providing guidance to faculty, students, and coworkers for particular components of high performance computing environment;
  
• Identifying new technologies, standards and architectures of importance;
  
• Performing other related duties as required or assigned.
  
• Minimum Qualifications
• A master's degree in computer science, engineering, natural science, physics, applied mathematics, or the equivalent combination of education, training and experience from which comparable skills can be acquired;
  
• 5 to 7 years related experience in algorithm development, parallelization, and optimization, re-architecting, and porting on HPC systems;
  
• Extensive background in computational science and algorithms development, including knowledge of Unix,
• Linux and Windows and demonstrated programming experience with Fortran, C, C++, HPC algorithms, programming models, debuggers, and performance tools;
  
• Must be able to analyze, optimize, re-architect and tune user codes;
  
• Demonstrated ability to design and develop new scalable computational algorithms;
  
• Expertise in scalable parallel software development methodologies including MPI and High Performance Fortran;
  
• Experience with numerical methods, Float Point Processing Architectures, Vector Processing, SIMD/MIMD Architectures, Matrix Arithmetic, Cache Coherence/Snooping, & Memory Latency;
  
• Experience in tackling large-scale computational problems (many thousands of cores);
  
• Experience providing user support or code development support in a high performance computing environment;
  
• Ability to design, executes, assess, and troubleshoot software programs and applications as required by projects.  This includes configuring, coding, developing, and documenting software specifications throughout the project life cycle;
  
• Excellent time and project management skills;
  
• Ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously, plan and implement project specifications, report project status, and identify delays or resource shortages;
  
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills with an ability to communicate solutions by providing both technical and non-technical interpretations of models and results;
  
• Excellent interpersonal skills, organizational skills, mentoring skills, and strong personal motivation are necessary;
  
• Ability engage colleagues in cross-disciplinary scientific discussion, write about own work, and collaborate within and across multidisciplinary teams;
  
• Must be able to quickly formulate and test ideas. 
   

Preferred Qualifications

• A PhD or the equivalent combination of education and experience from which comparable knowledge and abilities can be acquired;
  
• Demonstrated ability to develop and support software evaluations for faculty research applications in a University or Lab environment; 
  
• 7 or more years' related code parallelization, porting, optimization and software engineering experience in a university research environment, national science lab, or a commercial development enterprise;
  
• Experience debugging complex modeling and simulation applications within HPC environments;
  
• Experience analyzing, tuning, optimizing, and operation of scientific and engineering software applications;
  
• Experience working with scientific teams to plan, design, and implement extensions or modifications to existing HPC applications;
  
• Experience with a variety of HPC architectures: BlueGene, Shared Memory, and Distributed Memory Systems;
  
• Experience with co-processor technologies and development environments: CUDA, GPGPU, FPGA, and GRAPE;
  
• Experience in developing and conducting workshop and training sessions related to HPC for end users.
  

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Northwestern University is an equal opportunity, affirmative action educator and employer.

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