Job Offer University of Basel

Postdoc in High Performance Computing for Astrophysics – Open Position

The High Performance Computing research group (lead by Prof. Florina Ciorba) is seeking to hire a Postdoc (starting July 2020) with extensive C++ software development knowledge. The HPC team develops methods and solutions for the performance optimization of scientific applications and studies the interplay between the HPC applications and systems.

Your position

Development of an Exascale-grade software* for astrophysics and computational fluid dynamics, with specific tasks such as:

  • Code development following the C++14 standard
  • Code development and parallelization via shared-memory and accelerator-based programming, task-based programming for on-node multithreaded execution, as well as distributed-memory programming for the multi-process execution across computing nodes
  • Use high performance parallel I/O libraries and visualization
  • Use of state-of-the-art hierarchical and/or distributed dynamic load balancing techniques to exploit the massive hardware parallelism at runtime
  • Implementation of fault-tolerance mechanisms
  • Development of various physics simulation scenarios
  • Performance testing and tuning of the developed code distributed systems
  • Employ modern software development techniques and best-practices, using a continuous integration system and containerization solutions
  • Conduct research in programming models, performance modeling, optimization, scheduling, fault-tolerance, reproducibility, contribute to the analysis of new state of the art cosmological simulations of the coevolution of galaxies and black holes.
  • Participate in writing research papers and presenting research in leading international conferences
  • Code documentation and user training
  • Jupyter notebooks

Your profile

● PhD degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Computational Science, Mathematics or similar
● Extensive C/C++ knowledge with focus on performance
● Experience in parallel programming (OpenMP, MPI) for high performance computing is essential
● Experience with accelerator programming (OpenACC, OpenMP 4.5, CUDA) is a plus
● Experience in any of the following would be an advantage: containerization, CI, HPX, HIP, Intel oneAPI, OpenCL
● Experience with computational fluid dynamics is a plus
● English fluency (verbally and in writing)
● Strong team-working abilities
● Ease of interaction in a multicultural environment
● Experience in carrying out research projects and writing project reports is a plus

We offer you

  • Joining a dynamic and supporting working environment
  • Collaboration with highly skilled cosmologists, astrophysicists and computer scientists with software engineering background
  • Work tasks with significant impact on the scientific community
  • Access to the top #1 most powerful supercomputer in Europe and top #6 in the world (Piz Daint)

Application / Contact

Inquiries about this position can be sent to the group leader Prof. Florina Ciorba (florina.ciorba@unibas.ch).

Please send your application (see guidelines below) until June 12, 2020, to the same email address, and specify “Postdoc Position SPH-EXA” in the subject line. Include the following documents in your application as a single PDF file:

  • A brief (200 words) personal statement explaining your interest and motivation
  • Recent curriculum vitae
  • Links to publications and/or recent academic work
  • Links to/attachments of examples of personal contributions to software (GitHub, Bitbucket, etc.)
  • Contact info (no direct recommendation letters) for peers that can recommend you (upon request)

More information available here.