Senior Research Platforms Engineer (HPC)

at  The University of Manchester

UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

The University is a global institution known for innovation, world firsts, brilliant discoveries, and has 25 Nobel Prize winners amongst current and former staff and students. The computer revolution started here in 1948 when a machine known affectionately as ‘The Baby’, ran its first stored program. The celebrated wartime codebreaker Alan Turing worked on this computer during his time at Manchester.
The University has committed to becoming one of the world’s leading research institutions through one of the largest investments in facilities ever seen at a UK university, with £750 million spent so far and another £1 billion to follow.

ESSENTIAL SKILLS

• Substantial experience of using or administering HPC and/or HTC platforms.
• An in-depth knowledge of the Linux operating system, including administration and support.
• A good working knowledge of IT storage and networking technologies.
• The ability to work as an effective part of a team and to establish productive relationships with a wide range of people including academics, researchers, both technical and non-technical IT staff and research support staff, and external partners.
• Enthusiasm and initiative: the capacity to anticipate problems and find solutions; the ability to see opportunities and take advantage of them; a desire to learn new skills both technical and non-technical; and a can-do approach to work as it arises.
• Good face-to-face and written communication skills.

DESIRABLE SKILLS

• Experience working within an academic research environment (or a higher, preferably research, degree).
• Experience of cluster administration, including scheduling systems (e.g. SLURM, SGE), imaging, monitoring, Infiniband and HA.
• A good working knowledge of high-performance data storage platforms such as Lustre and/or GPFS.
• Experience installing scientific software packages using a variety of methods (e.g. compilation from source, EasyBuild, containers).
• Experience of using at least one high-level programming language such as BASH, Perl or Python.

You will be a member of the Research Platforms Team, (25+ IT specialists) developing and delivering computational and data storage services to the University research community. These include: high-performance computing (HPC) and high-throughput computing (HTC); resilient and high-performance storage; edge computing; custom Web stacks; and highly-secure platforms for hosting sensitive data.