Computer Scientist

About us

At CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. Using the world's largest and most complex scientific instruments, they study the basic constituents of matter - fundamental particles that are made to collide together at close to the speed of light. The process gives physicists clues about how particles interact, and provides insights into the fundamental laws of nature. 

Job description

Join our team at the ALICE experiment within the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to develop high-performance computing code for data processing.

ALICE is recording around 100 Pb of data per year, which makes the data processing extremely challenging and necessitates the usage of compute accelerators such as GPUs. The focus of your project is on efficient data structures for heterogeneous computing environments with compute accelerators such as GPUs.

You'll collaborate with a small team as part of the Next Generation Triggers program of CERN, aiming for solutions that benefit all LHC experiments.

Responsibilities:

• Work with a small team of experts to design and develop efficient data structures for heterogeneous environments with compute accelerators.
• Design clean and simple ways to define data types, minimising memory copies and maximising efficiency on diverse architectures.
• Collaborate closely with experts from various LHC experiments to understand their software needs and environments.
• Gain deep insights into compute accelerator performance characteristics, including alignment, memory access constraints, cache effects, and data structures.
• Investigate, and propose solutions for optimised data structures and benchmark and demonstrate efficiency, feasibility, and ease of integration.
• Partner with reconstruction experts from ALICE and other LHC experiments to adapt existing GPU event reconstruction algorithms to utilise the proposed data structure framework, conducting performance benchmarks to demonstrate efficiency gains.

If you're passionate about advancing high-performance computing and contributing to groundbreaking research in particle physics, we encourage you to apply. Join us at the forefront of innovation in LHC data processing.

Your profile

Required Skills and/or Knowledge:

• Programming languages: C++, any GPU programming language (CUDA, HIP, or OpenCL)
• Operation systems: Linux

Advantageous:

• Knowledge of multiple GPU programming languages and familiarity with GPUs of different vendors
• Knowledge of vendor-independent GPU frameworks like Alpaka.
• Experience with vectorisation (e.g. AVX on CPUs), efficient data structures and alignment for vectorised processing.
• Experience with High Performance Computing (HPC).

Eligibility criteria:

• You are a national of a CERN Member or Associate Member State. A limited number of positions are also available to candidates from Non-Member States. 
• You have a professional background in Computer Science (or a related field) and have either:
  
  • a Master's degree with 2 to 6 years of post-graduation professional experience;
  • or a PhD with no more than 3 years of post-graduation professional experience.
• You have never had a CERN fellow or graduate contract before.

What we offer

• A monthly stipend ranging between 6,194 and 6,808 Swiss Francs per month (net of tax).
• Coverage by CERN's comprehensive health scheme (for yourself, your spouse and children), and membership of the CERN Pension Fund.
• Depending on your individual circumstances: installation grant; family, child and infant allowances; payment of travel expenses at the beginning and end of contract.
• 30 days of paid leave per year.
• On-the-job and formal training at CERN as well as in-house language courses for English and/or French.

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