Division/School IT Services
Contract type Open Ended
Working pattern Full time
Salary £37,345 - £42,036 per annum (Grade J), £43,267 - £48,677 per annum (Grade K)
Closing date for applications 11-Mar-2019

A new and exciting opportunity has arisen for an enthusiastic and highly motivated Systems Administrator to join the University’s Advanced Computing Research Centre (ACRC), one of the UK’s leading High Performance Computing (HPC) and Research Data Storage (RDS) providers. The University’s largest HPC cluster contains more than 15,000 compute cores and provides over 800 TFlops. This computing power is coupled to a multi-petabyte, highly-resilient and highly-available storage facility serving thousands of users.

As a result of the arrival of a new ARM based supercomputer we are increasing the size of the team with the addition of a Senior HPC Systems Administrator.

The role holder will join a team of HPC specialists deploying large-scale HPC clusters to a large, diverse and vibrant community of researchers. The ideal candidate will marry an appetite for new technology and problem solving with a strong user support ethos and excellent communications skills. The role holder will work as a member of the ACRC team of systems specialists and Research Software Engineers. While we expect a good background in HPC we provide training and encourage future skills development for all our team.

The role holder will support a wide variety of researchers using a large range of applications, including community codes and third-party applications as well as research codes developed in house. We currently run 3 large HPC clusters collectively supported by the team.

Our user community ranges from new HPC users with little experience to large groups of skilled researchers who develop their own codes. The role holder will be expected to work with all groups and provide support at the appropriate levels for them.

The role includes configuration, tuning and development of the operating environment of the systems, deploying new clusters, software upgrades and HPC system administration. Diagnosing and resolving problems and performance analysis and tuning are also important to the role.
Candidates are expected to have skills in some of the following areas:
Scientific programming, modern programming languages used in science and engineering, parallel programming, HPC system administration and management, Linux system administration and configuration, parallel filesystems.

This role holder will be appointed to a J or K salary scale, according to qualification and skills. There is opportunity for career development from the lower scale.

For informal enquiries please contact either Simon Burbidge (simon.burbidge@bristol.ac.uk) or Caroline Gardiner (Caroline.Gardiner@bristol.ac.uk).

The closing date for applications is 11.59pm on Monday 11th March 2019.

We anticipate that interviews will be held in the last week of March 2019.

We appreciate and value difference, seeking to attract, develop and retain a diverse mix of talented people that will contribute to the overall success of Bristol and help maintain our position as one of the world’s leading universities.