Job Offer University of Basel

HPC Linux System Administrator (100%)

The University of Basel is ranked among the best universities in the world due to its research
achievements and as the oldest university in Switzerland, can look back on over 550 years of successful history. It counts over 12’000 students and 4’300 researchers in 7 faculties active in domains from humanities and social sciences to natural sciences, with a clear focus on life sciences and medicine. Research at university is increasingly data-driven and thus requires state-of-the-art services to support data-science applications, often with transdisciplinary approaches. sciCORE is the center for scientific computing offering the infrastructure and expertise to facilitate data-driven research.

The sciCORE systems team (6 system specialists) operates a large-scale scientific HPC environment consisting of a Linux cluster with ~15’000 cores (and about 70 GPUs), ~12 PB storage (GPFS), virtualization environments (ProxMox, OpenStack) for internal management, user applications and hosting of web-accessible scientific services. About 300 research groups benefit from our support with main domains of application in life science, biomedicine, physics, chemistry, and economy. In addition, sciCORE is one of the infrastructure nodes of the national initiatives BioMedIT and Swiss Personalized Health Network, providing a safe environment for research based on patient data. Data protection, security, access controls, and the associated work ethics are thus of high importance in our service.

If you are interested in getting on board, sciCORE is looking for an HPC Linux system administrator (100%).

Your assignments

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.

We offer you

At sciCORE, you will be part of a highly efficient and motivated team of IT specialists. You will have the opportunity to experiment with novel IT technologies and transform the relevant ones into robust productive services. Our interdisciplinary team of 20+ staff includes IT experts, scientific software engineers, data infrastructure managers, and data analysts, with opportunities to participate in interdisciplinary projects. We support our team members in their own training, networking, and career development. The initial contract is for 2 years, with the possibility to extend to a long-term contract subject to successful performance evaluations.

The University of Basel is an equal-opportunity and family-friendly employer committed to excellence through diversity.

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