HPC Linux System Administrator

Your position

With the support of our team, our new collaborator will :

• Help our diverse community of scientists in using our computing infrastructure and collaborate within the team to guarantee smooth operations of the environment.
• Contribute to the configuration and maintenance of the HPC and virtualization environments, and adapt it to the current needs of the research community, following our Infrastructure-as-Code approach.
• Collaborate with the implementation of security measures, user workspaces, and services in our biomedical IT research environment (sciCOREmed)
• Contribute to the general Linux operations of the service, depending on interest and skills (storage management, software deployment, support for web applications, IT security)
• Participate in relevant technical meetings with our partners at the University of Basel and at SIB - Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
• Configure, deploy, maintain, and document scientific computing frameworks offered as a service (JupyterHub, RStudio, Shiny, etc.

with a focus on stability and performance.

Contribute to the general operations of sciCORE as a scientific computing service (e.g. user support)

Your profile

Our ideal candidate has the following profile :

Essential

• Masters in computer sciences or equivalent, or academic degree in a computational domain
• Ability to work collaboratively in service operations based on agile and four-eyes principles
• Strong experience with Linux systems administration, preferably in an HPC-based research environment
• Hands-on experience in configuring, deploying, and supporting web services : incl. application and management services (e.

g. access control, monitoring, logging)

• Hands-on experience with script-based system management (bash, Python) and in using version control systems for configuration management (e.g. git)
• Knowledge of Linux configuration tools such as Ansible, Terraform, MAAS
• Knowledge of virtualization platforms like OpenStack, Proxmox, XenServer
• Experience with core IT security technologies (firewall and SSH server configuration, key management, VPNs)
• Motivation and an open mind to support a very diverse community of users with a broad range of computing experience

Desirable

• Experience with service deployment based on container technologies
• Knowledge of HPC tools and technologies such as EasyBuild, Slurm, Singularity (apptainer)
• Experience with advanced computing techniques (parallelization, use of GPUs)
• Experience with large-scale storage technologies such as GPFS or CEPH
• Experience with network architectures and configuration
• Experience with service deployment in cloud frameworks such as OpenStack
• Interest in in-depth HPC hardware environment design and tuning (storage, network, load balancing)
• Interest in surveying, prototyping, and deploying innovative technologies, such as filesystem-level encryption, HDFS, virtualization technologies, ...

The ability to communicate in English is a must (working language : oral and written) and German is a strong plus.

Our new collaborator will interact closely with researchers and other service providers at the university. We thus expect our candidate to be flexible, proactive, and capable of multi-tasking.