Research Software Engineer

The Role and Department

The Directorate of Advanced Research Computing (ARC) provides a broad computational capability to underpin and help define the nature of research and innovation that can be undertaken with the institution.

ARC’s mission is to deliver a coherent strategy for the computational support of research: enabling research and innovation to be at the forefront of computational practice; enabling academic leadership through the adoption and evolution of leading technology; fostering associated expertise; and enhancing interdisciplinary collaborations. Leading-edge platforms including High Performance Computing, computational and cutting-edge data analytics methods, and growth and retention of vital capacity in research software engineering and technical R&D are at the core of this endeavour.

We organise our activity under three main pillars:

1. Research Computing Platforms
2. Research Software Engineering
3. Developing researcher computational skills

Which is delivered by the Administration, Research Computing Platforms (RCP) and Research Software Engineering (RSE) teams.

Through collaboration between the Institute for Data Science, Department of Computer Science and ARC, several grants have been secured under the umbrella of the UK’s Digital Research Technology Professionals (dRTP) programme. These projects aim to create an upskilling and code porting landscape – predominantly for simulations and AI running on HPC machinery – for the whole UK DRI community. Their mission includes creating material for the RTP upskilling, running upskilling events, establishing a national performance assessment service, conducting performance assessments and benchmarking case studies, and helping codes to transition into the era of accelerate compute.

You will be embedded into the SHAREing (https://shareing-dri.github.io) project team, working closely with the PI and other project members, the RSEs and the platforms team within ARC and realise synergies with related activity within Durham and Nationally. You will contribute to the planning of upskilling events, the establishment a national performance assessment service, conduct performance assessments and benchmark case studies, driving the community’s transition into the era of accelerated compute. We expect the successful candidate to develop specialist knowledge and expertise across several advanced computing technologies that will influence the deliverables that are part of the grant and services delivered by ARC longer-term. The ability to work using one or more of these technologies is therefore essential:

• Compiled languages (e.g. C/Fortran)
• Shared and distributed memory programming tools (e.g. OpenMP, MPI)
• Accelerator programming (e.g. CUDA, OpenCL, SYCL)
• Serial and parallel debugging and profiling
• Parallel numerical algorithms and libraries.
• System software stack administration and novel/experimental hardware.

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