Contract : CDD, full time, 18 months
Level : Bac +5 minimum
Remuneration : depending on experience
Type of activity : BAP E - Computer science, statistics and scientific computation
Workplace : Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur – 96 Boulevard de l'Observatoire, 06300 Nice
Work context
Geosciences and astronomy are two disciplines facing big data challenges (complexity, volume) as a result of observation and simulation. Exploiting this data relies on high performance computing in dedicated, regional or national centres. Changing scale requires optimising existing software and co-designing platforms and software in order to successfully carry out this processing in a context where the cost of computing resources has stopped decreasing (capital cost, energy, environmental impact). This applies in particular to INSU’s National Observation Services to which researchers at OCA contribute in astronomy (eg. SKATE and INPOP).
OCA leads the French contribution to the radio-astronomy observatory SKA, contributes to the procurement of its two supercomputers (SDP) and to organising SKA’s Regional data Centres (SRC). Each SDP’s need to continuously ingest 1Tb/s and produce and deliver to the SRC more than 0.8 PB/day of science products within tight financial and energetic envelopes drives the need to scrutinise the match between the software (under development) and the hardware and software architectures in charge of its execution in order to improve the efficiency of these supercomputers – and beyond of the SRC. This is a joint effort of the SCOOP team within the SKA SAFe Agile framework, of collaborations between HPC research teams in CNRS and Inria and with industry.
OCA develops the INPOP planetary ephemerides which provide accurate positions and velocities for 14,000 solar system objects. CNES and ESA use this data for the navigation and exploitation of space missions (Gaia, Bepi-Colombo, JUICE). Research teams have used them to constrain the search for the ninth planet (still to be observed), to test the validity of different theories of gravitation in the solar system, to constrain the mass distribution in the solar system in the main asteroid belt as well as in the Kuiper belt. On a different scale, INPOP has allowed for calibrating the dating of geological samples for paleoclimatic studies in the frame of the AstroGeo ERC.
Missions
Contribute to the evolution of the National Observation Services at OCA in geosciences and astronomy in terms of high performance computing with codes either existing or being developed as part of large projects (SKA) or as an interface to agencies (ESA) in a context of rapidly increasing needs and increasing cost of resources (capital, energy).
The recruited person will be part of the SCOOP SAFe Agile team working on software/hardware co-design for the two supercomputers of SKA. He or she will evaluate accelerator-based strategies, programming models, IO rates, resource utilisation, performance and energy efficiency in order to make these systems as efficient as possible.
He or she will also contribute to the planetary ephemerides INPOP, in particular in terms of reducing execution times et running the software in order to add a large number of new objects resulting from the Gaia mission (DR3) and to provide ephemerides data to ESA missions in operation (Bepi-Colombo, JUICE).
For Virgo, he or she will adapt a rare source search pipeline to the Lyon IN2P3 computing center using the slurm batch scheduler. The pipeline will be adapted such that it is Open Science Grid complient for the LIGO computing centers.
Activities
The research engineer will work at OCA. OCA is an institute composed of three laboratories (UMR) and a supporting structure (UAR) employing close to 450 persons at 4 locations. He or she will join the IT department part of the UAR. He or she will work on projects coming from several UMR of OCA and collaborate with members of several teams.
The reseach engineer will carry out the following activities :
- Analyse the needs of the National Observation Services in relation to high performance computing on supercomputers and derive functional specifications and development plans
- Study hardware/software co-design questions in HPC for identified applications, notably through the definition of benchmarks to identify and characterise possible hardware and/or software improvement avenues
- Prototype the corresponding improvement and collaborate with developers to optimise the software
- Develop an infrastructure that orchestrates the running of benchmarks and collects various performance metrics (performance, data flow, power etc.) on different platforms
- Run benchmarks on a variety of platforms and interpret results, for example via profiling and data analysis
Skills
- Proficient in high-performance computing (HPC) and hybrid parallelism (MPI and OpenMP), including optimization technique in a parallel programming context (benchmark, profiling)
- Experience with HPC environments, including batch schedulers (like SLURM), package managers (module, Spack), working knowledge of Linux in command line mode
- Experience in collaborative development
- A working knowledge of modern C++ (14+)
- Good knowledge of English (B2 level written and spoken) for writing documentation and actively participating in meetings
- Creative and innovative mindset
- Ability to work in a team
- Open Science Grid knowledge
- A working knowledge of signal processing and data analysis would be appreciated
- Knowledge of other programming languages and paradigms would be appreciated.
- A working knowledge of collaborative development environments (DevOps, git) would be appreciated
- Previous experience on shared HPC clusters (national or regional) would be a plus
- Knowledge of accelerators (like GPUs) and their use via programming libraries/environment (CUDA, oneAPI, Kokkos, HIP) would be a plus
- Knowledge of containerization technologies (Docker, Singularity, Sarus) would be a plus
Application deadline : 30 June 2023
Contacts
Philippe Berio : Philippe.berio@oca.eu
Jean-Philippe Ghibaudo
Jean-philippe.ghibaudo@oca.eu
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