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002745
Research Associate
Engineering & Computing Sciences
Full Time/Fixed Term – 2 Years
Grade 6
20th September 2016
20th October 2016 (11.30pm)
Job Description
The School of Engineering and Computing Sciences at Durham University invites
applications for a postdoctoral position to begin between 1 October 2016 and 1
March 2017 for a two year period. Extensions are subject to funding. The position is
funded by an EU H2020 grant titled ExaHyPE – An Exascale Hyperbolic PDE Engine
(http://exahype.eu). Candidates with research interest in the area of large-scale
distributed- and shared-memory parallelisation of numerical simulations, notably
hyperbolic equation systems, are encouraged to apply. The research will become a
member of an international consortium of researchers and contribute to a common
code base, and will work on work packages of the project in collaboration with Dr
Tobias Weinzierl. The goal is to develop a novel light-weight domain decomposition
scheme with redundant MPI ranks (compute nodes) such that
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work can easily (without large communication impact) be moved between
ranks responsible for (partial) subdomains; both via shared memory and MPI
subdomains are only weakly consistent and allow for independent local time
stepping
ranks may drop out
ranks can be removed from the active computation to stream simulation
snapshots without harming the overall scalability
Contact for informal enquiries
Dr Tobias Weinzierl
Email: [email protected]
Responsibilities
The postholder will:
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Understand and convey work on multiscale, dynamically adaptive mesh
refinement, explicit discretisation of hyperbolic conservation laws and high
performance engineering in the context of dynamic load balancing
Assist and contribute to research papers and publications
Contribute to a large open source software package, share code and support
other developers w.r.t. high performance computing aspects, document
outcome and assist on the development of training material
Prepare and assist on (supercomputing) proposals
Participate in research meetings with collaborators and PIs (which includes
travel to research partners in Italy and Germany)
Use initiative and creativity to develop novel light-weight load balancing and
resiliency schemes
Identify independently scalability challenges and problems affecting the
project deliverables
Assist the PI and the project manager to plan and manage the research
activities as well as to planning large-scale simulation runs
Actively participate in dissemination and teaching activities around the
developed open source software
Essential criteria
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BSc, MSc or equivalent in scientific computing, computer science with strong
simulation emphasis or any computational science or engineering discipline
Excellent programming skills in C++ and MPI
Knowledge of performance analysis tools and high performance computing
environments
Very good team working and communication skills; notably proven ability to
develop effective working relationships and collaborations in small-scale
project teams
Proven ability to use initiative and creativity to solve problems and where
necessary to recognise when to refer these to a supervisor
Desirable criteria
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Demonstrated ability to present at workshops and/or conferences
Knowledge of Discontinuous Galerkin or Finite Volume schemes
Experience with tools for data postprocessing/large-scale visualisation
Background in either computational astrophysics or seismic simulation
Solid understanding of computer architectures and novel architecture trends
(Intel KNL, e.g.)
The candidates are supposed to include a cover letter with their application setting
out how their experience and knowledge concords with the advertised role.
Applications are particularly welcome from women and black and minority ethnic
candidates, who are under-represented in academic posts in the University. The post
is available either as a job share (0.75FTE) or on a full-time basis (1.0FTE).