31) Careers in HPSC

31) Careers in HPSC#

Last time:

  • I/O in HPC

Today:

  1. Careers in HPC/HPSC

1. Careers in HPC/HPSC#

  1. National Labs

  2. Industrial R&D

  3. Academia

  4. Research Software Engineering

  5. Performance Engineering

  6. Personal resources

1. National Labs#

  • Department of Energy

    • Office of Science (Berkeley, Argonne, Pacific Northwest, …)

    • National Nuclear Security Administration (Livermore, Los Alamos, Sandia)

    • Office of Renewable Energy (NREL)

  • National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

    • Weather and climate, operational numerical weather prediction and research

  • National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)

    • Comprehensive climate focus (includes ocean, sea ice, land ice, land)

  • National Institute of Standards and Technology

    • Fundamental materials (e.g., gas equations of state), metrology

  • National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

    • Earth research, especially remote sensing (satellite and aerial)

    • Fluid and structural mechanics for safe, reliable, efficient flight (includes partnerships with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA))

    • Materials science and engineering (overlapping scope with industry)

Examples of lab/agency-led software#

  • HPC Middleware (MPI implementations, resource managers)

  • Numerical Libraries (PETSc, hypre, Sundials, Trilinos, MFEM)

  • Open source simulation applications (MOOSE library, LAMMPS, Nek, Albany)

  • Internal/export controlled simulation (BLAST, FUN3D, Sierra, MCNP, MOOSE apps)

  • Community Earth System Model (NCAR), Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM)

  • Some orgs publicly embrace open source LLNL Open Source

2. Industrial R&D#

  • Hardware vendors and cloud providers: CUDA, HIP, SYCL, OpenMP, MPI

    • “Science/engineering should use our programming models/run fast on our hardware”

    • “Data science” (statistical computing) should also be fast

  • High-stakes methods development

  • Research papers in specific venues are valuable

  • Windows into industrial research culture

    • Who participates in comparison studies, standards organizations, etc.?

    • Who attends technical conferences (not trade shows) and holds elected positions in professional societies?

3. Academia#

  • Tenure-track

    • Teaching

    • External funding is mainly to support students and research staff

    • Eternally swimming in hats

  • Research faculty/research software engineer

    • Usually reliant on external grants, often a “center”

    • There are some “research software engineering” facility/service groups (e.g., Princeton) that may serve several projects. On the other hand, there are positions that are project specifc. See a few examples below:

    • The Institute of Computing for Climate Science (ICCS) at the University of Cambridge

    • CU Institutes (CIRES, INSTAAR, LASP, JILA, BioFrontiers, …)

    • CliMA

    • VESRI

4. Research Software Engineering#

5. Performance Engineering#

A performance engineer is a specialist who ensures that software applications and systems perform efficiently and reliably, meeting specific requirements like speed, scalability, and responsiveness.

They focus on identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks throughout the software development lifecycle, often working with developers and other engineers to optimize code and system architecture.

These could be working for industry, e.g.,:

  • Intel

  • NVIDIA

  • AMD

  • ARM

  • IBM

or Academia and National Labs, especially DOE Labs:

  • Argonne National Lab (ANL)

  • Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL)

  • Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL)

  • Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL)

  • Los Alamos National Lab (LANL)

  • Sandia National Lab (SNL), etc.

Conferences of relevance to the HPC community:#

6. Personal Resources#

You can find a talk on my website that I gave a few years ago to my Alma Mather. Let’s give a look together at the slides.

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