Context And Mission

The Computer Sciences (CS) department of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center aims at carrying out research and development to influence the way computing machines are built, programmed and used. The Workflows and Distributed Computing (WDC) group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center aims at carrying out research on programming models for distributed computing.

The WDC group contributes to the project with the COMPSs programming model.
COMPSs is a task-based, parallel programming model that supports the development of workflows that run in parallel in distributed computing platforms.
Currently, we are working in the R binding (RCOMPSs).

In order to evaluate its performance and identify new necessary functionalities, we seek to develop applications in R-COMPSs.
In particular, we will start with a data analysis application from the BSC social sciences group that seeks to identify relationships and patterns between a large number of scientific articles.
The project will consist of developing this and other applications in R-COMPSs, evaluating their performance on the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer and analyzing new necessary functionalities. This project can be presented as master thesis.

Key Duties

Development of RCOMPSs workflows
Development of required extensions to the RCOMPSs programming model
Development of tests to check the extensions with the RCOMPSs test infrastructure and contribution to RCOMPSs documentation that illustrates how to use the newly developed features
The candidate will work closely with other research members on the team of the Workflows and Distributed Computing group

Requirements

Education
Computer science/Data science degree (Master student)
Essential Knowledge and Professional Experience
Good programming skills in R and basic knowledge of C/C++
Additional Knowledge and Professional Experience
Previous experience in COMPSs and its runtime or in similar task-based environments
Knowledge in distributed computing
Knowledge of task-based programming models
Competences
Fluency in spoken and written English, while fluency in other European languages will be also valued

Conditions

The position will be located at BSC within the Computer Sciences Department
We offer a part-time fellowship (20h/week), a good working environment, a highly stimulating environment with state-of-the-art infrastructure, flexible working hours, extensive training plan
Duration: 6 months
Holidays: 22 days of holidays + 6 personal days + 24th and 31st of December per our collective agreement
Salary: we offer a competitive salary commensurate with the qualifications and experience of the candidate and according to the cost of living in Barcelona
Starting date: 16-05-2026