R & D High Performance Computing Engineer, Institut de Physique du Globe, Paris

The Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP) hires a R & D software engineer specialized in optimization and high performance computing. This is a fixed term contract of 12 months, funded by the French National Agency for Research (Project AVSGeomag).

Keywords

High performance computing, optimization, grand challenges

Required qualification

Master degree in Scientific Computing (or equivalent)

Required skills

• Software development under Linux.
• Numerical approximation of partial differential equations (basic knowledge).
• Parallel scientific programming (with experience in the parallelization and optimization of massively parallel codes).
• Languages ​​and programming environments: Fortran, MPI, OpenMP.

Mission assignments:

The successful candidate will become a member of the service de calcul parallèle et de traitement de données (S-CAPAD, parallel computing and data processing services) of the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, whose offices are located in the heart of the fifth district of Paris (http://www.ipgp.fr). He / She will join a team of two persons: a research engineer responsible for the administration of IPGP’s parallel computer, and a research engineer in charge of those programming aspects related to the various applications deployed on this parallel computer.
IPGP is a world recognized leader in the field of the direct numerical simulation of the geodynamo. The spearhead of this activity is the PARODY code, which relies on a hydrid parallel strategy combining MPI and OpenMP. In addition to being used on IPGP’s parallel computer, the code has been run for several years now on national supercomputing centers (managed by IDRIS) and used by about ten research groups worldwide.

In the framework of the AVSGeomag research program, a geomagnetic data assimilation tool based on PARODY has been implemented recently, which is based on an ensemble sequential strategy. Tens (hundreds) of simulations are integrated simultaneously, and the statistics described by this dynamic ensemble are used to assimilate the stream of observations (this is an Ensemble Kalman Filter).
The main mission of the successfull candidate will consist of optimizing this new assimilation tool (in terms of efficiency, portability, scalability), in order to it make possible to deploy it over architectures possessing thousands of cores, probably within the PRACE European framework. He / she will also take care of writing the documentation and making the software available online, for dissemination to the community.

He / she will anticipate the evolution of simulation and analysis tools in order to take advantage of future hardware architectures and will participate in the exploitation of IPGP’s parallel computer, whose renewal is impending.

Start date: September 2013
Salary: from 2,200 to 2,500 net euros per month, depending on qualifications and experience.

Contacts:
Alexandre Fournier (fournier@ipgp.fr), PI of the AVSGeomag research program
Julien Aubert (aubert@ipgp.fr), co-developer of PARODY
Jean-Pierre Vilotte (vilotte@ipgp.fr), in charge of S-CAPAD.