PhD - Software Defined Environments

Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Barcelona, Spain

 

Description

 

BSC under the collaboration agreement with IBM are conducting research and development projects around the Technology Center for Supercomputing for providing education for new professionals and for developing common communication, commercial initiatives and marketing partnership in order to create market interest in IBM and BSC technologies. The Autonomic Systems and eBusiness Platforms research group is looking for a PhD Student to collaborate with research project related with IBM. The project will explore the applicability of the so-called "Software Defined Environments (SDE)" to HPC workloads as it has been previously done with transactional and data analytics workloads. Workloads will be described in a declarative way to capture their requirements and resource abstractions and management technologies will be developed to enable such workloads to be deployed and optimized in an SDE cloud environment. The need for SDEs is justified by the fact that the use of special hardware (e.g. FPGAs, and GPUs) and fast network interconnects is more and more common in all kinds of workloads, either HPC or not traditionally considered HPC. So a related angle of exploration is how HPC technologies can impact modern workloads, and how HPC architectures can be made available to these workloads in the context of SDEs. Candidates must be interested in starting a research career and pursuing a PhD degree in the scope of an international team. Main responsibilities:

 

- Support to the development of the project
- Identify suitable workloads for use on SDEs
- Extend IaaS platforms (mostly OpenStack) to deal with HPC workloads
- Define SDEs to descrine HPC workloads running on heterogeneous clouds
- Test and verify the correctness of SDEs both analytically and empirically (after deploying the workloads on SDE)

 

Requirements

 

- Having a M.Sc Degree in Computer Sciences, Telecommunications or related discipline
- Capacity to interact and build strong relations with a diverse members/stakeholder/staff base.
- Willing to travel (mandatory)

 

Desirable Skill Specifications:

 

- Excellent computing skills in high level computer languages (especially Java and C++ and Web Technologies) and experience with UNIX/LINUX environments and scripting languages
- Strong Knowledge of Network Protocols and High Performance Networks (Infiniband, RDMA)
- Strong Knowledge of IaaS technologies (virtualization, OpenStack, OpenNebula)
- Strong Knowledge of HPC workloads on heterogeneous environments (workloads, GPUs, FPGAs)
- Knowledge of application and development of Cloud Computing applications
- Knowledge of Memcached or similar Key/Value stores
- Knowledge of NoSQL databases
- Fluency in English essential
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- Ability to take initiative, prioritize and work under set deadlines and pressure
- Ability to work independently and in a team

 

More information and applications

 

Interested candidates, please submit:

- Presentation letter (including salary expectations)
- Curriculum vitae (including academic record)
- Candidates may optionally submit a software portfolio (links to developed applications or a public software repository).

 

http://www.bsc.es/about-bsc/employment/vacancies/phdstsdes