DESCRIPTION

DEPARTMENT OVEVIEW:

The Mission of the San Diego Supercomputer Center is to translate innovation into practice. SDSC adopts and partners on innovations in industry and academia in the areas of software, hardware, computational and data sciences, and related areas, and translates them into cyberinfrastructure that solves practical problems across any and all scientific domains and societal endeavors. Cyberinfrastructure refers to an accessible, integrated network of high-performance computing, data, and networking resources and expertise, focused on accelerating scientific inquiry and discovery. With more than 250 employees and $30-50M of revenue a year, SDSC is a global leader in the design, development, and operations of cyberinfrastructure.

SDSC supports hundreds of multidisciplinary programs spanning a wide variety of domains, from earth sciences and biology to astrophysics, bioinformatics, and health IT. SDSC presently operates multiple large HPC systems ranging from a 120k x86 CPU core general purpose system to a system explicitly designed for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, and a nationally distributed system open for all of academia to integrate with. SDSC offers research data services across the entire vertical stack from universally scalable storage to consulting services on FAIR, Big Data, and AI. SDSC offers a rich set of cloud services both on-premise, in the commercial cloud, and as hybrid services across both.

SDSC has three geographic scopes, a national scope supporting cyberinfrastructure for the entire US research and education community, a California scope with a special focus on convergence research that addresses the three dominant threats to CA: Drought, Fire, Earthquakes, and a campus scope focusing on advancing the global impact of SDSC by advancing the research objectives of the UC San Diego faculty, researchers, and students.

SDSC impacts researchers at scales from 1,000’s to Millions. SDSC annually trains thousands of researchers in cyberinfrastructure tools and software, and supports thousands of individual researchers via Unix accounts on its large HPC systems. SDSC was a leader developing the Science Gateway concept, and continues to be a global leader in its evolution. SDSC operates multiple major such gateways with user communities ranging from the tens of thousands to the millions. SDSC’s educational programs includes online courses that have been attended by more than a million students.

SDSC is committed to democratizing access to cyberinfrastructure across all of its geographic scopes. SDSC strives towards a culture that supports our employees to be their best, achieve their goals, and enjoy their lives, both professionally and personally.

POSITION OVERVIEW:

As a senior member of the HPC System Group in the Data Enabled Scientific Computing (DESC) Division, the Network and System Architect will provide technical expertise, leadership, and hands-on support in areas of research networking, systems architecture, and production operations for SDSC’s high-performance computing (HPC), storage, and networking systems. Working closely with team members in DESC, SDSC, and collaborators at UCSD and externally, the incumbent will lead and participate in technology evaluations, designs, and deployments to support a wide range of systems, including petascale supercomputers, advanced storage systems, HPC interconnects, and national research and engineering networking initiatives. Activities include design, architecture, operational support, performance troubleshooting, linux system and network tuning, TCP packet debugging and system and network infrastructure deployment. Within the HPC Systems group, the incumbent will participate in the development and conduct of operations processes to ensure that systems and services meet the highest standards of availability, reliability, security, and responsiveness. The incumbent will also participate in on-call rotation for after-hours operations as required.

Having wide-ranging, extensive experience with computer science, networking research and development principles, the incumbent will perform up to and including the most complex research networking projects with site-wide, institution-wide and/or multi-institutional scope. As a research and technology expert in multiple aspects of networking and cyberinfrastructure (CI), s/he will advise on and resolve highly complex research and technology projects/issues and participate in and often lead the design, implementation and selection of new hardware and software technologies for advanced networking related to HPC, data science, and CI projects. Additionally, the incumbent will independently manage major phases of network system deployments, lead user groups discussions, conduct research, analyze systems and processes, define hardware and software requirements, perform detailed assessments of system development options, present and recommend solutions, develop and plan deployments, implement components, and review and document the systems.

The incumbent will represent SDSC at national and international meetings, conferences and committees through technical briefings, presentations, workshops, training, and technical papers as well as participate in industry/education technical committees. The Network and System Architect will represent SDSC for research networking issues with organizations such as CENIC, Internet2, and large-scale national R&E networking projects and facilitate knowledge transfer by presenting results and findings in technical forums and publications.

For more information, please visit: https://www.sdsc.edu/

QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or engineering, or related field with at least 5 years' experience as a network or systems engineer within a high-performance computing center or similar environment, and/or equivalent combination of experience and training. Master's degree preferred.

• Knowledge of software, database, infrastructure or other IT function. Knowledge relating to the design and development of software across the organization. Strong theoretical knowledge of and advanced work experience with communications technologies including: Cisco switches and routers, Juniper routers and switches, Arista switches, InfiiBand switching, digital switching and network techniques; telecommunications software applications including generic switching software, network management, wireless networks, and management systems.

• Advanced knowledge of and experience with complex and experimental networking protocols, including IPV6, SRv6, and Kubernetes overlay networking. Strong demonstrated experience with Ethernet and IP networking, including VLANs, classless IP, supernets and subnets, and routing

• Knowledge of other related areas of IT. Ability to apply department processes and procedures to work. Demonstrated expertise in systems administration, including Linux, network operating systems, and network security, especially in large-scale (hundreds - thousands of computational units) on-prem or distributed systems with systems installed a multiple geographic locations nationally and/or internationally.

• Demonstrated effective communication and interpersonal skills, including the ability to communicate technical information to technical and non-technical personnel at various levels in the organization.

• Demonstrated national expertise in advanced networking. Established reputation through mechanisms such as committee memberships, technical chairs, journal papers, and workshops and symposia in the field of networking and supercomputing. The position requires knowledge and experience with a range of networking architectures.

• Demonstrated experience designing, integrating and supporting high-performance interconnects for high-performance computing and data systems, including high speed Ethernet, InfiniBand, NVLink, and PCIe.

• Knowledge of Linux internals. Strong background and experience with performance tuning Linux kernels, device drivers and networking stacks. Strong knowledge of TCP/IP packet level debugging and performance tuning.

SPECIAL CONDITIONS

• Job offer is contingent upon satisfactory clearance based on Background Check results.