Technical advisor for High Performance Computing

at  National Research Council Canada

PRIORITY WILL BE GIVEN TO THE FOLLOWING DESIGNATED EMPLOYMENT EQUITY GROUPS: INDIGENOUS PEOPLES* (FIRST NATIONS, INUIT AND MÉTIS), PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES AND RACIALIZED PERSONS*.

• The Employment Equity Act, which is under review, uses the terminology Aboriginal peoples and visible minorities.
  Candidates are asked to self-declare when applying to this hiring process.
  City: St-John’s – Newfoundland
  Organizational Unit: Knowledge, Information and Technology Services
  Classification: CS-3
  Tenure: Continuing

Language Requirements: English essential

• Assignments and secondments may be considered according to NRC’s policies.
• This position may be underfilled
• Pool will be created

Work Arrangements: Due to the nature of the work and operational requirements, this position is eligible for a hybrid work arrangement (combination of working onsite and telework). Employees in this position who telework will be required to travel to the identified work site at least three times per week at their own expense.
We recognize that Indigenous candidates may have important connections to their communities. If you are an Indigenous candidate, you may be eligible for an exception to this work arrangement. To learn more, please contact the hiring team, using the contact information below.

EDUCATION

Bachelor degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Technology or Information Systems.
For information on certificates and diplomas issued abroad, please see Degree equivalency

EXPERIENCE

• Significant* and recent** experience in running jobs on a batch cluster

o Running single and multi-application analysis pipelines (e.g., Computational fluid dynamics, bioinformatics)

• Troubleshooting shell scripts, job files
• Troubleshooting Message Passing Interface (MPI) issues in the pipelines mentioned above.

o Recent** experience with the Nvidia CUDA platform.

• Recent** experience with containerization (e.g., Docker, Singularity).
• Experience in HPC cluster administration. This includes:

o Installation, replacement, configuration and optimization of hardware as well as maintenance.
o Configuring all enterprise grade cluster networking components including ethernet and high-performance networking such as InfiniBand.
o Maintenance of core HPC components such as head nodes, compute CPU nodes, compute GPU nodes, storage appliances and file systems such as IBM Scale (GPFS).
o Maintaining and configuring node operating systems (e.g., Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and scheduler (e.g., SLURM)

LANGUAGE REQUIREMENTS

English essential
Information on language requirements and self-assessment tests

We are looking for a vibrant and dynamic technical advisor to join the Knowledge, Information, and Technology Services Branch (KITS) to support research centers with High Performance Computing (HPC) end user support (analyst duties) and cluster maintenance. The advisor would be someone who shares our core values of impact, accountability, leadership, integrity and collaboration.
Working closely with KITS IT personnel, the candidate’s role will be to ensure end user support and operations of the cluster so that scientists can run large scale analyses efficiently and minimal disruptions. The candidates will also, on a regular basis, meet the users and address evolving configuration requirements and how they can be met within the departmental rules and regulations. The day-to-day duties will include, but not limited to:

• End user support

o Application support (installation and runtime)
o Job debugging
o Script debugging

o Platform migration

• Hardware configuration, monitoring and repair on nodes, switches and storage appliances
• Operating system patching and configuration
• Scheduler configuration and monitoring