1 PhD position Sow BGAS in Spain | Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)

The project aims to explore the use of high performance in-memory databases. Active Storage could dramatically change the way that Supercomputing, BioInformatics research centers and Cloud Providers manage data in the BioInformatics domain, eliminating the bottleneck created by the use flat files to store data and making data pipelining easier; and in the Data Analytics domain, introducing scalable active data repositories accessible locally or remotely. In both cases, new algorithms and approaches to large-scale data management problems will be studied and proposed based on the large all-to-all bandwidth (and corresponding bandwidth to local solid-state storage) available in existing prototypes combined with a very large in-memory storage capacity.

For the BioInformatics domain the project will explore genomics workflows to be run using distributed databases. For the Data Analytics domain the project will explore Deep-Learning techniques.

We are opening 1 PhD Student Position. Candidates must be interested in starting a research career and pursuing a PhD degree in the scope of an international team. During the project, the student will yearly spend 3 months in the IBM TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown, NY.

Main Responsibilities

• Support to the development of the project
• Identify suitable workloads for use on BGAS platform
• Study the opportunities to perform data-prefetching and data-driven workflow orchestration on the selected workloads
• Test the functional correctness of the workflows ported on a BGAS prototype
• Test the scalability of the workflows ported on a BGAS prototype

Desirable Skill Specifications

• Excellent computing skills in high level computer languages (especially Java and C++ and Web Technologies) and experience with UNIX/LINUX environments and scripting languages
• Strong Knowledge of Network Protocols and High Performance Networks (Infiniband, RDMA)
• Strong Knowledge of Memcached or similar Key/Value stores
• Strong Knowledge of BioInformatics and/or Data Analytics domains
• Knowledge of NoSQL databases
• Fluency in English essential
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Ability to take initiative, prioritize and work under set deadlines and pressure
• Ability to work independently and in a team

Qualifications & Experience

• Having a M.Sc Degree in Computer Sciences, Telecommunications or related discipline
• Capacity to interact and build strong relations with a diverse members/stakeholder/staff base.
• Willing to travel (mandatory)

The position will be located at BSC within the Computer Science department.

Interested candidates, please submit:

• Presentation letter (including salary expectations)
• Curriculum vitae (including academic record)
• Candidates may optionally submit a software portfolio (links to developed applications or a public software repository).