Context And Mission

The Computer Sciences (CS) department of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center aims to carry out research and development to influence the way computing machines are built, programmed and used. The Workflows and Distributed Computing group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center performs research on programming models for distributed computing. More specifically, this group is contributing to the DT-GEO project (https://dtgeo.eu/), which aims to develop a prototype for a digital twin on geophysical extremes, including earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and anthropogenic-induced extreme events. Many of the DTC components are developed with COMPSs, and the automatic recording of metadata related to an experiment is enabled with the workflow provenance mechanism of COMPSs.

COMPSs (compss.bsc.es) is a task-based programming model that enables the parallel execution of applications in distributed computing environments. For this research, the group is looking for an engineer to design and implement the required extensions to the workflow provenance mechanism of the COMPSs runtime and the improvement of its related services.

Workflow provenance is the ability to record metadata from a computational experiment run as a workflow. In COMPSs, this is done in an interoperable format to enable the interaction with tools following the same metadata format. Workflow provenance metadata is useful for: reproducibility of experiments, FAIR workflows, knowledge extraction and traceability/explainability of results, among others.


Key Duties

- Develop extensions to the workflow provenance generation of COMPSs to support both containerised tasks and containerised applications
- Improve the current COMPSs Reproducibility Service to be able to re-execute COMPSs applications that include containers
- Integration with eFlows4HPC services (Workflow Registry, Software Catalog and Container Image Creation service) to close the loop on application generation / reexecution
- The candidate will work closely with other research members on the Workflows and Distributed Computing group
- Contribution to COMPSs user manual that illustrates how to use the newly developed features
- Contribution of the candidate to the DT-GEO project


Requirements

Education
- Computer science degree or similar

Essential Knowledge and Professional Experience
- Container technologies (Docker, Singularity or similar)
- Knowledge of HPC and Distributed Computing
- Good programming skills in Python and Java
- Previous experience in runtime systems and system software
- At least 2 year experience in a similar position

Additional Knowledge and Professional Experience
- Metadata standards
- Semantic Web technologies

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 full-time contract (37.5h/week), a good working environment, a highly stimulating environment with state-of-the-art infrastructure, flexible working hours, extensive training plan, restaurant tickets, private health insurance, support to the relocation procedures
Duration: Open-ended contract due to technical and scientific activities linked to the project and budget duration
Holidays: 23 paid vacation days plus 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: As soon as possible