About BSC
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) is the leading supercomputing center in Spain. It houses MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, was a founding and hosting member of the former European HPC infrastructure PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), and is now hosting entity for EuroHPC JU, the Joint Undertaking that leads large-scale investments and HPC provision in Europe. The mission of BSC is to research, develop and manage information technologies in order to facilitate scientific progress. BSC combines HPC service provision and R&D into both computer and computational science (life, earth and engineering sciences) under one roof, and currently has over 1000 staff from 60 countries.
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We are particularly interested for this role in the strengths and lived experiences of women and underrepresented groups to help us avoid perpetuating biases and oversights in science and IT research. In instances of equal merit, the incorporation of the under-represented sex will be favoured.
We promote Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, fostering an environment where each and every one of us is appreciated for who we are, regardless of our differences.
If you consider that you do not meet all the requirements, we encourage you to continue applying for the job offer. We value diversity of experiences and skills, and you could bring unique perspectives to our team.
Context And Mission
Supercomputers are essential for tackling the most challenging and complex scientific and technological problems. Beyond simulations, they now enable the use of neural networks and large language models to address engineering challenges, empowering companies to achieve their goals through AI technologies. This position will be part of the Operations Department within the User Support team. The team will focus on supporting AI applications for key projects utilizing BSC resources, including performance optimization, code porting, specialized AI tutoring, and enhancing the scalability and performance of models.
BSC hosts one of the largest and most advanced supercomputers in Europe within the framework of EUROHPC-JU. The pre-exascale system MareNostrum 5 (MN5) delivers a sustained performance of 205 PFlops, with over 180 PFlops powered by NVIDIA H100 GPUs, making it one of the world’s leading AI and HPC infrastructures. MN5 represents a key technological pillar for Europe’s digital sovereignty, enabling groundbreaking research in artificial intelligence, data analytics, and scientific computing.
A major innovation of the system is the MN5-AI partition, specifically designed to accelerate AI research and industrial innovation. This partition plays a central role in the AI Factories initiative, which aims to strengthen the European AI ecosystem by providing large-scale computational resources for training and deploying advanced AI models. Through MN5-AI, BSC contributes directly to building a federated network of AI supercomputing centers in Europe, fostering collaboration between academia, industry, and public institutions to advance trustworthy and high-performance AI technologies.
Among the key initiatives supported by MN5 and MN5-AI is the MINERVA EuroHPC project, which aims to ensure that Europe’s AI communities can fully harness the power of the EuroHPC JU supercomputing infrastructure. MINERVA provides training, education, and technical assistance in collaboration with the EuroHPC Academy and the AI Factories initiative. It supports AI teams through a three-tier system that helps integrate HPC resources into their workflows, port AI applications to HPC systems, and pre-train or customize large-scale foundation models. MINERVA establishes a European “Community Hub” to advance large-scale AI research and development, offering access to datasets, software stacks, and best practices.
The HPC User Support team is therefore crucial in optimizing the use of MN5 and MN5-AI, ensuring that users can fully exploit these resources for their AI and HPC workloads. The team assists key projects with daily operations, helping researchers and companies push the boundaries of what is computationally possible.
Key Duties
- Optimize and adapt scientific application codes to new pre-exascale architectures and systems, focusing in AI applications and technologies.
- Improve the performance of existing AI environments, improving the serial efficiency and the scalability, changing, if necessary, the code or helping the developers with their required modifications.
- Choose and adapt algorithms and/or library routines to improve applications to specific computer architectures (accelerators, new programming models, etc.).
- Provide consultancy to scientists on AI solutions that can improve the evolution of their research.
- Generate performance analysis and benchmarks for selected applications and report the results to the applications developers.
- Collaborate with other functional groups at European and International level on technical matters related to supporting AI scientific application work.
Requirements
- Education
- A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related discipline with a focus on Artificial Intelligence at a technical level is required.
- Master's degree in a related field is desirable.
- Essential Knowledge and Professional Experience
- Experience working with AI models and running them in parallel in HPC systems.
- Experience using performance analysis tools, and parallel debuggers for GPUs.
- Experience supporting and collaborating with external partners.
- Good understanding of Linux environment and Shell scripting.
- Experience working with Parallel programming codes (MPI and OpenMP) and batch systems like SLURM as a user.
- At least 2 years of experience in a similar position working with AI solutions.
- Additional Knowledge and Professional Experience
- Experience in managing big and collaborative projects and experience with git and SVN.
- Experience porting codes to accelerators specifically NVIDIA GPUS.
- A thorough understanding of high-performance computing architectures.
- Experience porting and optimizing applications on UNIX-based systems experience in Fortran, C, MPI, OpenMP, and parallel methods.
- Good level in English, both written and spoken
- Competences
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills to be able to work within a team to complete tasks on schedule.
- Analytical problem-solving ability.
Conditions
- The position will be located at BSC within the Operations Department
- We offer a full-time contract (35h/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: 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: asap
Applications procedure and process
All applications must be submitted via the BSC website and contain:
- A full CV in English including contact details
- A cover/motivation letter with a statement of interest in English, clearly specifying for which specific area and topics the applicant wishes to be considered. Additionally, two references for further contacts must be included. Applications without this document will not be considered.
Development of the recruitment process
The selection will be carried out through a competitive examination system ("Concurso-Oposición"). The recruitment process consists of two phases:
- Curriculum Analysis: Evaluation of previous experience and/or scientific history, degree, training, and other professional information relevant to the position. - 40 points
- Interview phase: The highest-rated candidates at the curriculum level will be invited to the interview phase, conducted by the corresponding department and Human Resources. In this phase, technical competencies, knowledge, skills, and professional experience related to the position, as well as the required personal competencies, will be evaluated. - 60 points. A minimum of 30 points out of 60 must be obtained to be eligible for the position.
The recruitment panel will be composed of at least three people, ensuring at least 25% representation of women.
In accordance with OTM-R principles, a gender-balanced recruitment panel is formed for each vacancy at the beginning of the process. After reviewing the content of the applications, the panel will begin the interviews, with at least one technical and one administrative interview. At a minimum, a personality questionnaire as well as a technical exercise will be conducted during the process.
The panel will make a final decision, and all individuals who participated in the interview phase will receive feedback with details on the acceptance or rejection of their profile.
At BSC, we seek continuous improvement in our recruitment processes. For any suggestions or comments/complaints about our recruitment processes, please contact recruitment [at] bsc [dot] es.
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Deadline
The vacancy will remain open until a suitable candidate has been hired. Applications will be regularly reviewed and potential candidates will be contacted.
OTM-R principles for selection processes
BSC-CNS is committed to the principles of the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers of the European Commission and the Open, Transparent and Merit-based Recruitment principles (OTM-R). This is applied for any potential candidate in all our processes, for example by creating gender-balanced recruitment panels and recognizing career breaks etc.
BSC-CNS is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion. We are pleased to consider all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability or any other basis protected by applicable state or local law.
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