[Clug-work] opening for an M.Sc. studentship in High Performance Computing

[Andy Rabagliati]

https://candidate.csir.co.za/psp/hr91prd_cgw/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/c/HRS_HRAM.HRS_CE.GBL?Page=HRS_CE_JOB_DTL&Action=A&JobOpeningId=304683&SiteId=1&PostingSeq=1

Studentship: Masters

About the job:

The CSIR’s Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) has an opening for an M.Sc. studentship in High Performance Computing. The CHPC provides high performance computing facilities to universities and research institutions in South Africa.

The student's project is to develop a system through which a user of a HPC facility can schedule an environment with their batch job. The user's scheduled environment must be independent of the service environment operating on the compute node; this can be achieved through virtualisation.

The proposed system is expected to have a significant impact on the administration of HPC clusters. The system would enable HPC facilities to rely on scientific communities to create and support environment images suitable for their members. This has the potential to remove administrative burden from the HPC centre while improving the user's experience.

An example work-flow for the system:

    Job submitted
    Execution nodes selected
    VM image deployed to nodes
    Job execution begins in VMs
    Job execution complete
    Results returned via batch system
    VM's destroyed
    Execution nodes marked free
    Job reported as complete

Key responsibilities:

    Identify an appropriate batch scheduler to modify
    Investigate alternatives to virtual machines for the environment containment
    Evaluate the system's overhead for the time required to begin job execution
    Evaluate the impact of the environment containment on performance
    Identify security risks arising from allowing users to deploy custom environments inside the cluster and suggest ways to mitigate these risks.

Qualifications, skills and experience:

    B.Sc. (Hons.) in Computer Science or B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering
    Extensive Linux experience
    Experience with software development
    Experience with HPC
    Strong mathematical background.

Closing date: 31 August 2015