Context And Mission
The Department of Earth Sciences of the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre-Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), BSC-ES henceforth (bsc.es/earth-sciences) is one of the most active groups in air quality and atmospheric composition modelling, climate prediction and climate services in Europe. The department is currently composed of about 105 people, including technical and support staff, structured in four distinct but interacting research groups: Earth System Services (ESS), Atmospheric Composition (AC), Climate Variability and Change (CVC) and Computational Earth Sciences (CES).
The AC group interacts with the CES group on the development and optimization of model codes, pre- and post-processing tools, and operational model settings, with the CVC group on the links between atmospheric aerosols and climate, and with the ESS group to enhance the use of air quality products and services.
The AC group develops the Multiscale Online Non-hydrostatic AtmospheRe CHemistry model (MONARCH) and contributes to various forecasting activities. MONARCH is the operational model of the first WMO Regional Specialized Meteorological Center for Atmospheric Sand and Dust Forecast (i.e., the Barcelona Dust Regional Center), and contributes to the International Cooperative for Aerosol Prediction (ICAP) and the Copernicus Air Quality Regional Production Service of the European Commission. The group also develops and maintains the CALIOPE air quality system (“CALIdad del aire Operacional Para España”), which provides high-resolution air quality forecasts over Europe and Spain using the in-house emission model HERMES. Furthermore, the AC group also contributes to the development of the EC-Earth Earth System Model ecosystem, which is developed and maintained by various institutions in Europe, with important contributions from the BSC. EC-Earth3 is an established model with a solid in-house supporting software stack. EC-Earth4 is the newest model cycle with important structural changes to improve scalability, performance, and model complexity.
Within the CES group, the successful candidate will be part of the Models and Workflows team, to improve the necessary software stack to perform experiments in different High Performance Computing facilities, as well as provide support to the scientific activity of the AC group.
The improvement work mainly lies in the participation in the development, testing, and optimization of scientific models, mainly MONARCH and EC-Earth, on a number of HPC platforms, including porting existing functionalities and integrating new ones. These model configurations will run on state-of-the-art systems such as the upcoming EuroHPC Pre-Exascale computers.
The Models and Workflows team devotes to the research and development of methodologies and tools essential to efficiently use the variety of computing resources available at the BSC and in other HPC institutions. The team is composed of 15 members and has strong connections with the Performance and Data teams, as well as with the scientific groups.
Key Duties
- Porting of scientific workflows (models and supporting software) to different architectures.
- Development and maintenance of workflow scripts and libraries to execute Earth models on state-of-the-art HPCs.
- Support to run experiments using workflow managers and different shell or python scripts.
- Support in solving the problems found by other researchers and engineers and assistance to include their own solutions into the set of tools developed and maintained by the Earth Sciences Department.
- Contribute to the development and execution of automated integration tests.
- Work within an Agile framework, attend project meetings, and contribute to writing project reports.
Requirements
Education
- Having a BSc in Computer Science, Telecommunications, Physics, Mathematics or related discipline
Essential Knowledge and Professional Experience
- Good development skills and experience with UNIX/LINUX environments.
- Experience in Python programming and/or scripting languages (Bash).
- Experience in version control in a collaborative environment, including SVN or Git.
Additional Knowledge and Professional Experience
- Previous experience in a scientific area related to the position, in particular, air quality or meteorological modeling (e.g. WRF, CMAQ) will be valued.
- Understanding of HPC computer architecture issues, including CPU, accelerators, memory, interconnect, parallel I/O, and computational performance in general.
- Previous experience in parallelization of numerical codes (e.g. MPI, OpenMP, CUDA), scientific software and tools (R, Python Numpy and Scipy, …), and/or continuous integration tools (e.g. Jenkins) will be evaluated.
- Experience with coding and documentation best practices and standards.
Competences
- Earth system models and High Performance Computers are sophisticated tools and systems. The candidate should have excellent problem-solving skills and a proactive attitude to address new challenges and optimize the current solutions to gain in reliability and efficiency.
- This is a specialised position, so the successful candidate is expected to have a demonstrated learning capacity and the motivation to maintain a learning progression during the contract.
- The BSC Earth Sciences department is an international and interdisciplinary environment, so the candidate must be fluent in English and have good written and verbal skills and the capacity to support Earth and Computational scientists.
- Ability to take initiative, prioritize and work under set deadlines and pressure.
- Ability to work both independently and within a team.
Conditions
- The position will be located at BSC within the Earth Sciences Department
- We offer a full-time contract (37.5h/week), a good working environment, a highly stimulating environment with state-of-the-art infrastructure, flexible working hours, extensive training plan, restaurant tickets, private health insurance, support to the relocation procedures
- Duration: Open-ended contract due to technical and scientific activities linked to the project and budget duration
- Holidays: 23 paid vacation days plus 24th and 31st of December per our collective agreement
- Salary: we offer a competitive salary commensurate with the qualifications and experience of the candidate and according to the cost of living in Barcelona
- Starting date: ASAP