RCT #186 - Northwestern's experience with success stories.
Plus: Standups; Lockwood on life in industry; Best forking practices; Energy debugging; Genomic data cybersecurity and privacy from NIST; and Slinky for slurm on k8s
Happy New Year, everyone!
The newsletter fell off in the fall, as I was juggling too many other activities. I think everything’s back under control, and I’m looking forward to resuming the regular schedule throughout this new year!
Kicking off 2025, Christina Maimone, Associate Director of Research Data Services at Northwestern IT Research Computing and Data Services, agreed to do an asynchronous interview; Christina’s group has started writing up case studies for projects the group has worked on, and was willing to talk about it:
RCT: Tell us about your department, and what you wanted to achieve with putting together these case studies and testimonials.
Christina Maimone (CM): Our team is part of the central IT organization at the university that supports faculty, students, and staff across all schools and departments. We offer a broad range of services and support spanning HPC and other computing resources, data management and storage, data science, visualization, and statistics.
Last year we put together a portfolio with short descriptions of our data science, statistics, and visualization projects. That portfolio has been useful for showing researchers the range of our expertise in that area and to give them ideas for how we can collaborate with them, but it covers the research products resulting from just one of our service areas and doesn't include any testimonials. With these new case studies, we wanted to highlight the broad range of our services and focus on the researchers' perspectives and experiences. These cases allow us to showcase support that happens at all stages of the research process and that may be difficult to tie to a specific publication.
RCT: How did you choose people to interview? Was it hard to get people to agree to do it?
CM: We asked our team to brainstorm which researchers and projects they thought would be good to highlight, then we tried to pick examples from those candidates that spoke to different service areas and types of support we provide, as well as different research fields across the university. Many of the researchers we started with are people we've supported over several years or with multiple services, so we had strong relationships to work from. All of the researchers we’ve asked so far were happy to help. We tried to keep what we were asking them to do minimal, and we offered them options for responding via email or on a Zoom call. We had the members of our team who supported each researcher make the initial ask for their participation, and they then facilitated a connection to our communications team who followed up on the details.
RCT: Does having some published now make it easier to get new people to agree to do the interview?
CM: It hasn't been difficult to get people to agree, but I do think it will be helpful to point to these published cases when reaching out to researchers moving forward. Personally, being able to share what we have so far makes me less anxious to ask additional people to participate because it's easy to show them what we're trying to achieve.
RCT: How was the process like of doing the interview and writeups? Anything harder or easier than you expected?
CM: When you’ve been closely involved with a project, it can be difficult to let go of the details and distill what might have been months of work into a clear and succinct story. It was a tremendous help to work with our IT communications team on these because they were able to pick out the key elements and put them together in a focused way. They spoke with the members of our team who supported each project to understand the context and our contributions, and then they reached out to the researchers to get their perspectives. They also developed a template that works well for a wide variety of cases. Having someone who wasn’t directly involved in providing the support draft for each case study helped ensure that the result would be relevant and understandable to a wide audience. They made it easy on us!
RCT: Those are some amazing pull quotes you have in those articles. Did you have to try hard to get people to say something so positive and quoteable?
CM: This is another area where involving our communications team in the process was really helpful. The sentiment and core of the quotes come straight from the researchers. But our communication team's experience hearing what the researchers were saying and then capturing that in a form that also works well as a quote makes the end result successful and impactful.
RCT: I know it’s early days yet, but what has reaction been to them so far - any reactions from decision-makers or other researchers who have seen them?
CM: So far, they've been helpful when talking to new researchers about their needs because they show that not only can we provide the support they're looking for, but also we have done similar work successfully in the past.
What I didn’t expect was how great these would be to read ourselves. The process of helping researchers can often be complex and take a while to resolve. Seeing the work brought together through a clear story and hearing about the impact from the researchers themselves is a good reminder of why we do what we do.
RCT: How are you planning to use these materials?
While the primary audience is researchers who might use our services, we think they’ll be useful for helping our partners in other IT groups understand what we do as well. For those working in distributed school and departmental IT groups, these stories are a much more memorable way to share the range of services we offer than listings in a service catalog or bullet points on a slide. Hopefully they can see the faculty and students they work with on a daily basis in these cases. Similarly, our colleagues who run and support the infrastructure that our services rely on don’t interact directly with researchers on a regular basis. Their work is essential for the research that is done at Northwestern University, but they don’t always get to see the results of their work. This is one way we can share the impact of their work with them.
RCT: Given what you’ve learned so far, what are you thinking as follow ups?
CM: We have a few more case studies in process and then our next challenge is incorporating them with our service information. We focused on faculty-led projects for these full cases, but it would also be beneficial for students and postdocs to hear from their peers about how and why they can use our services. We have some feedback processes for workshops and consultations that can be adapted to support getting shorter testimonials or endorsements. One of the lessons is to make asking for feedback that we can share with others part of our routine—it feels easier to do now that we’ve started.
Thanks so much, Christina, for sharing your experience with the case studies. As you will all know, this is something I’m a big fan of! (Success stories are the best advocacy, #179, and a write-up on how to do them). It’s a great way to communicate the importance of the work we do, and I was particularly heartened by Christina’s comment about how great it was for the team to read these.
Are there things your group is doing that you’d like to share? Or would you like to like to talk about something you’re working on? Email me at jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org, or schedule a time to chat. I’d love to hear from you!
And now, on to the roundup:
Managing Individuals, Teams, and In Organizations
On the other side of the block over at Manager, Ph.D., in issue #176 I covered how Scientific Systems are Uncertain; while Human Systems are Ambiguous. Also covered in the roundup was:
- Feedback is for behaviour change, not self-expression
- Trust lets you see reality
- Change is risky, and makes things worse before improving them
- How to writing usefully
PS - I’ve moved MPHD to a new location - most of the material copied over smoothly but there's still bits and pieces which need fixing. If you see anything wrong, please let me know! Just hit reply.
Technical Leadership
Standups: Individual → Teammate - Kent Beck
I’ve argued in the past (#137) that retrospectives are to managing teams what one-on-ones are to managing individuals - that they are the key meeting that builds trust and maintains open lines of communications.
Beck makes a good case that for some teams, standups may actually play that role:
That’s what the standup meeting is there for—to give everyone a moment to say, “Oh, yeah, okay, these people & their needs are going to be important to me for the next 9 hours.” Take a breath. Get to work.
and that it may be more necessary for remote team:
If the team is co-located & used to showing up at around the same time & pairs switch frequently & folks gather around the espresso maker most mornings, then maybe folks don’t need a ritual to manage the transition from person to worker. If the team is fully remote & in different timezones & just getting used to each other then likely yes, the need for ritual supporting the transition is greater [..]
Managing Your Own Career
How has Life after Leaving the Labs Been Going? - Glen Lockwood
Lockwood, well known in the community for being an incredibly capable and influential DOE HPC storage architect, has been at Microsoft and has thoughts! He has a great overview of the differences he’s seen, and what the labs (or really, research support teams in academia) struggle with in a way industry doesn't. Two I think are particularly worth highlighting:
- Accountability: “Teams coordinate dependent work with each other, trades horses on what the priority of each request is, and at the end of planning, have committed agreements about what work will be done in the next semester. […] The DOE Labs [and DRI teams - LJD] operate much more loosely in my experience. There, people tend to work on whatever pet projects they want until they lose interest. “
- Pace and decision making: “Because managers and leaders are accountable, I've also found them to be much more empowered to just do what they feel is the right thing to do. Whereas no big decision in the DOE Labs [or academia - LJD] can be made without reviews, panels, strategic offsites, more reviews, and presentations to headquarters--all of which could add months or years to a project--the direction can move on a dime because all it takes is one executive to sign off and accept full responsibility for the consequences of their decision. “
The “Accountability” (and really, “Relevance”) sections touch on something deeper - there’s clear overall goals in mind. So just doing individually worthy things isn’t enough, they have to coherently add up to something.
The best PI-led large groups understand this, but it’s something a lot of digital research support teams wrestle with. It touches on “Strategy” (#168, #169), but also a coherent programme of action with something like a logic model (#163) and the flywheel of success for our teams (#176). I’ll write more about this next week.
Everything Lockwood writes lately is deeply thoughtful and worth sharing - his thoughts in his recent ISC recap, for instance, are extremely clear and helpful.
Research Software Development
How to fork: Best practices and guide - Joaquim Rocha
Rocha describes a sanity-saving process for maintaining a downstream fork of an (active) upstream effort.
Most of research software management handles the easy-mode case of collaboration, where the code is really only contributed to by one group, so we can get a little fast and loose with our git history.
This is absolutely not the way to go when we’re tracking an active upstream, and if we want to get some of our changes (ideally, all of them) merged!
Rocha covers some basic hygiene in your own fork:
- Use atomic commits
- Identify your fixes and non-fixes
- No evil merges (merges that introduce changes not properly from either parent)
- Rebase early, rebase often
And then how to handle the rebasing:
- Straighten git history
- Minimize downstream changes
- Squash downstream commits
- Keep upstreamable commits you’d like merged at the beginning
Unveiling the Energy Vampires: A Methodology for Debugging Software Energy Consumption - Roque, Cruz, and Durieux, arXiv:2412.10063
In research computing, as elsewhere, people are starting to pay more attention to energy use and not just wall-clock time performance.
This is still a relatively new interest. We have hundreds of tools for identifying where time is being spent, but few for identifying where power is being consumed.
But not none! The authors tell us that on the CPU, Intel offers an interface RAPL which contains relevant information, and perf, PowerTOP, and Powerstat can access that information. AMD has its own partially-compatible version of this interface with more fine grained data. From there, (literal!) hot-spots can be identified, and energy microbenchmarks can zoom in on particular code might be a culprit.
In this paper (with code), the authors investigate Redis, which has notably different power consumption on different Linux distributions. They walk through their methodology and identify memcpy (and different memory allocators) in alpine vs ubuntu (gnu libc vs musl) as the culprits.
It’s the systematic methodology which is of broadest interest, and the code and notebooks they supply which walks you through the methodology are very useful.
GitHub copilot now has a free tier, presumably feeling some competition from products like Cursor.
Interesting paper describing automated OpenMP mutation testing for performance optimization
Research Data Management and Analysis
Genomic Data Cybersecurity and Privacy Frameworks Community Profile - Pulivarti et al, NIST
NIST has been doing great cybersecurity work lately, and this document is the second public draft on their Genomic Data Cybersecurity and Privacy Frameworks community profile - their cybersecurity and privacy frameworks applied specifically to genomic data.
The document is quite clear and straightforward reading (don’t be put off by its 174 pages, most of it is essentially appendices), and lays out not just objectives for this type of data but gives a sense for how the broader cybersecurity and privacy frameworks are applied to a specific case.
This is a good document to have a careful look through for any group that’s starting to handle more sensitive data.
Research Computing Systems
Slinky: Bridging Slurm And Kubernetes - SchedMD
Well, 2024 came and went, and as far as I can tell, Coreweave did not in fact opensource SUNK, their (by all accounts extremely successful) Slurm-on-k8s implementation. (Though containers seem to be available, maybe?)
However, SchedMD hasn’t been standing still. They have implemented their own, and with a much better name - Slinky.
I haven’t used slinky yet, so I can’t speak for the implementation, but it seems to me that something like this is almost certainly the direction things are going to be moving - Slurm (or similar) is a fantastic tool for what it does, but its super-optimized for a very narrow use case. More complex workloads - or even simpler-but-different workloads, like standing a single long standing service that might require varying number of resources over time - are very difficult to shoehorn into slurm’s mental model of a task being a single short-lived rectangular thing taking N nodes x M hours.
Whereas k8s’s super-general model is really hard to grasp for people who aren’t full-time Kubernetes admins, and so the simple case takes a lot of seemingly mystifying boilerplate.
Running something like a batch scheduler on top of a general purpose “cluster operating system” like k8s seems a natural progression, and tbh seems a lot better motivated than trying to build a next-generation “does everything conceivable” framework like flux.
Random
93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs, because of course they are.
Nice visualization of piecewise linear neural networks (e.g. with ReLU activations). I’ve used this to do handwavy explanations of the universal approximation theorem.
SQL-Studio, a nice Sql database explorer.
In-DB diffs of different large datasets - reladiff
Heck, why not use SQL for Advent of Code
Nice blog post from earlier in the year about BB(5) being proved to be 47,176,870 (e.g. the largest number of steps a terminating 5-state Turing machine can take is ~47M). What I find interesting is the growing use of Coq/rocq or Lean for not just testing but communicating proofs.
When I was in grad school, we counted mathematical operations and tried to reduce the number of them to get high performance. Now it’s all about sophisticated memory access. Here’s an example of counting bytes as fast as possible.
And here’s optimizing binary search using SIMD.
And here’s 20M particles at 20fps on CPU in javascript.
Curses TUIs in bash w/ bashsimplecurses.
Scientific programming in Lean, a theorem prover.
Look at what they’ve taken from us, part 1 - one of the last users of floppy disks, the SF Muni, is replacing the system and it’ll use some fancy new-fangled storage system instead
part 2 - the IDEs of 30 years ago - Borland C++ or Turbo Pascal had the single best IDE I've ever used.
Find your new favourite UUID right here - everyUUID.com
That’s it…
And that’s it for another week. If any of the above was interesting or helpful, feel free to share it wherever you think it’d be useful! And let me know what you thought, or if you have anything you’d like to share about the newsletter or stewarding and leading our teams. Just email me, or reply to this newsletter if you get it in your inbox.
Have a great weekend, and good luck in the coming week with your research computing team,
Jonathan
About This Newsletter
Research computing - the intertwined streams of software development, systems, data management and analysis - is much more than technology. It’s teams, it’s communities, it’s product management - it’s people. It’s also one of the most important ways we can be supporting science, scholarship, and R&D today.
So research computing teams are too important to research to be managed poorly. But no one teaches us how to be effective managers and leaders in academia. We have an advantage, though - working in research collaborations have taught us the advanced management skills, but not the basics.
This newsletter focusses on providing new and experienced research computing and data managers the tools they need to be good managers without the stress, and to help their teams achieve great results and grow their careers. All original material shared in this newsletter is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0. Others’ material referred to in the newsletter are copyright the respective owners.
Jobs Leading Research Computing Teams
Given the long break, there's a tonne of amazing jobs in the new-listing highlights below in the email edition; the full listing of 339 jobs is, as ever, available on the job board.
Director of Genome Analytics - Ellison Institute of Technology Oxford, Oxford UK
The Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT) Oxford tackles humanity’s greatest challenges by turning science and technology into impactful global solutions. A cornerstone of EIT Oxford’s mission is its upcoming 300,000-square-foot research facility at the Oxford Science Park, set to open in 2027. This cutting-edge campus will feature advanced labs, an oncology and preventative care clinic, and collaborative spaces to strengthen its partnership with the University of Oxford. The Pathogen Mission highlights EIT’s transformative approach, using Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) and Oracle’s cloud technology to create a global pathogen metagenomics system. EIT is looking to recruit a Director of Genome Analytics to lead computational and statistical analyses of genomic data, focusing on pathogen and human genomics. Reporting to the Principal Scientist, this role is essential to advancing tools and methodologies that address challenges in individual-level diagnosis and population health, particularly for emerging pathogens.
IT and Computing Manager, Faculty of Mathematics - University of Cambridge, Cambridge UK
The Faculty of Mathematics comprises two closely-linked departments; the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) and the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics (DPMMS). The Faculty of Mathematics is looking to appoint an experienced IT and Computing Manager with proven strategic leadership skills to create and implement a new vision for IT services in support of its academic mission. Working with colleagues across the Faculty and the wider University, the IT and Computing Manager will ensure that IT services provide a digital environment that will enable the Faculty to fulfil its goals in research, teaching and learning as well as providing the tools to support delivery of the Faculty's professional services and administrative functions. The role holder will have the vision and strategic leadership skills necessary to review existing provision and plan future developments to support the current and future needs of this research-intensive academic institution with an international reputation for excellence.
Academic Director of Research Computing Infrastructure & Professor, Faculty of Environment, Science, and Economy - University of Exeter, Exeter UK
As Professor, you will be an established scientist with significant contributions to at least one area of Computer Science, including but not limited to High Performance Computing, Distributed Computing, Software Engineering, Human Computer Interaction, Cyber-security, Healthcare, Environment and Artificial Intelligence. You will be an innovative and visionary researcher with a strong and current record of research funding and international quality publications. We are particularly interested in individuals whose work demonstrates a high level of originality and rigor, contributing new insights and methodologies that push the boundaries of Computer Science. The post holder will be a leading international figure with the ability to attract world-class academics to their research group. As Academic Director of Research Computing, you will provide senior academic leadership and strategic direction for the research computing landscape at Exeter. By working with both academic user communities and professional services, this role will lead the development of a strategy for advanced research computing (to include high-performance and mid-level compute, along with an effective support model), helping to position the university to take maximum advantage of new technologies, agree the OLA (Operating Level Agreement) need required by the research community and to realise opportunities for efficiency gains and increased cost recovery.
Research Engineering Manager, Responsibility & Safety Evaluations - Google Deep Mind, London UK
This role is for an engineering manager working on responsibility and safety assurance evaluations at Google DeepMind. These are the evaluations which allow decision-makers to ensure that our model releases are safe and responsible. The role involves leading an engineering team in developing and maintaining these evaluations and the infrastructure that supports them.
Director of Research Technology and HPC Services - University of Maryland, College Park MD USA
The Director of Research Technology and HPC Services, within the unit of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure and Internet Global Services (ACIGS) organization in the Division of Information Technology (DIT), is responsible for providing research-optimized, secure and compliant cyberinfrastructure (CI) services and software tools to fulfill the research mission of the university. The Director manages the development of high-performance computing (HPC) clusters, cloud implementation, data storage and transfer services for fundamental, sensitive, CUI and secure computing systems. The university has a broad spectrum of research disciplines and the position will provide support services for domain specific technology tools. The position will provide resource and budget planning, faculty support, and expertise in research computing and data. The Director will be a strategic thinker with an open and collaborative style who fosters teamwork, sustains a learning environment for a growing number of staff and develops an open, engaged culture that engenders trust from the broader university-wide research community. The position will lead a team that regularly interacts with UMD researchers to design, integrate and customize research technology solutions and provides tiers 2 and 3 support for DIT’s research technology services. Strong project management, interpersonal, and customer-centric/user-experience skills are required to effectively oversee and coordinate a team of staff responsible for planning, implementing, delivering and monitoring a wide variety of customer-facing research technology services. The Director will have the ability to articulate complex concepts to cross-functional audiences. The position reports to the Assistant Vice President/Chief Technology officer.
Lead High Performance Computing Engineer - Brown University, Providence RI USA
The Lead High Performance Computing Engineer is responsible for the HPC team that manages high-performance computing (HPC) cluster, storage, and networking infrastructure. This includes, but is not limited to the integration of HPC systems with Brown’s overarching IT infrastructure, deployment and management of parallel file systems, and maintaining system security. The Lead HPC Engineer is expected to occasionally debug and possibly rewrite low-level systems software, evaluate software for potential acquisition, and work closely with vendors’ support organizations to ensure timely resolution of problems and high availability of CCV production services. In addition, occasional user support will be performed to assist in system-level application debugging/optimization.
Software Development Manager, High Performance Computing - AWS, Seattle WA USA
An HPC infrastructure is complex in nature including the provisioning of multiple resources as computing, networking, storage and the deployment and configuration of different operating systems and software tools that enable our customers to fulfill their HPC workloads.You will be leading a team in Seattle focused on control plane for brand new service we just launched and will be part of an engineering org that is based in Boston, Seattle, and Italy. The ideal candidate will have strong distributed systems design and software engineering experience, Linux/Unix and networking fundamentals, and a passion for AWS technology. In this role you will be responsible for leading engineers in tackling core software engineering problems - distributed computing, resource usage efficiency, and rock solid testing. We also work with a lot of AWS cloud technologies (e.g., EC2, S3, ECS, Lambda, FSx for Lustre, Batch, Lambda, Elastic Fabric Adapter- EFA) to design and run highly scalable systems.
Director of Architecture - Genomics England, London UK
The Director of Architecture is responsible for shaping and driving Genomics England's technology strategy and architecture roadmap, ensuring alignment with business objectives and enabling the delivery of our vision. Collaborating closely with architects and stakeholders across the organisation, the role oversees the development of a cohesive enterprise architecture and establishes a mature framework of standards, governance, and processes.
Head of Platform Engineering, High Performance Computing - Winstno Fox, London UK
As the Director of Engineering, you’ll lead a cutting-edge platform and engineering team, driving innovation and scaling the infrastructure to power the largest and most advanced workloads. With an established platform featuring world-class technology (including a vast H200 estate), you’ll also lead the charge in optimizing operations, implementing automation, and setting new industry benchmarks. This is more than a leadership role—it’s an opportunity to shape the future. You’ll build and inspire a growing team of top-tier engineers, driving the design and evolution of an infrastructure platform that adapts to a rapidly changing global technological landscape.
Data Science Senior Manager - Abbott Labs, Various CA USA
This highly visible role, will lead the Lingo Data Science team where you will work alongside Product & Engineering teams to build the next-generation Biowearables. Data Science activities will focus on a wide range of activities including personalized recommendation systems, sensor data analytics, signal processing algorithm development, predictive model development, etc.
Principal Bioinformatician Computational Lead - Inotiv, Raleigh NC USA
The Principal Bioinformatician Computational Lead oversees the development and implementation of a multi-site effort in computational toxicology and pharmacology services, primarily located at the Raleigh/Research Triangle Park (RTP) office of Inotiv. They are part of a multidisciplinary team supporting the development, validation, and evaluation of alternative toxicological methods for implementation in international regulatory testing.
Director, Bioinformatics and Software - Missouri Botanical Garden, St Louis MO USA
The Director, Bioinformatics and Software directs and coordinates activities related to research, evaluation, selection and/or development of software solutions, and maintains ongoing knowledge of systems that support the mission and purposes of the Garden. Additionally, the Director, Bioinformatics and Software leads and participates in strategic IT/System planning functions of the Garden. The Director supervises and evaluates staff and develops and controls budgets relative to areas of assignment. This role will also develop discovery research by designing systems architectures and infrastructures for the computerization of data and directs the development of biodiversity informatics tools, preparing reports and managing staff.
Director, Center for Research Computing - Rice University, Houston TX USA
The Center for Research Computing (CRC), within the Office of IT, enables faculty and researchers to effectively use on and off-premises resources and services, including (1) shared high-performance computing systems, (2) VM and cloud computing, (3) data storage infrastructure, (4) secure research systems, (5) a wide range of scientific instruments, and (6) broader cyberinfrastructure and services. The CRC currently manages three HPC systems (a general-purpose HPC / HTC cluster and 2 small GPU clusters), as well as three research data storage services. In addition to HPC and storage, CRC service areas include: Facilitation & Training; Data Analytics, Mapping & Visualization; Research Systems & Endpoint Management; Cloud for Research; and Proposal Support. The Director of the Center for Research Computing (CRC) will lead a multi-year growth plan that includes expansion of infrastructure and development of new services to advance data-enabled, world class research. Leading a vibrant and collegial staff, you will foster a culture that embraces learning, team practices, and continuous improvement and prioritizes constituent engagement.
Head of Operations for the MRC Centre of Research Excellence in Therapeutic Genomics - University of Oxford, Oxford UK
The MRC Centre of Research Excellence (CoRE) in Therapeutic Genomics at the University of Oxford is a new, ambitious, globally collaborative research program focused on pioneering genome-targeted therapies for rare genetic disorders. As Head of Operations, you will work closely with the MRC CoRE Director, Prof. Stephan Sanders, and the Leadership Team, guiding the MRC CoRE’s strategic planning, stakeholder engagement, financial oversight, and operational efficiency. You will play a critical role in advancing research culture, supporting academic and non-academic training and career paths, setting best practices in responsible innovation, and ensuring high standards of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) across the MRC CoRE’s programs.
HPC Data Centre Infrastructure Manager - University of Cambridge, Cambridge UK
The role is based in the University of Cambridge's Research Computing Services (RCS), a leading UK National Supercomputing Centre, providing facilities and services to world-renowned scientists, clinicians and engineers across the UK and Europe. You will be responsible for managing and maintaining the data centre infrastructure owned by the RCS. You will lead a technical team of IT professionals, including network and systems engineers, and data centre technicians, to ensure that the infrastructure is reliable, secure, and efficient. You will also be responsible for developing policies and processes for managing HPC infrastructure assets to ensure compliance with legal and regulatory requirements. You will manage relationships with vendors and service providers to ensure that the infrastructure is supported and maintained.
Senior Research Data Scientist and Manager - University of Birmingham, Birmingham UK
The Institute for Interdisciplinary Data Science and AI (IIDSAI) is a nexus for collaborative research and education at the University of Birmingham. Advanced Research Computing (ARC) builds and runs a range of specialist services for researchers, collectively known as BEAR (Birmingham Environment for Academic Research). Serving all disciplines, BEAR covers an increasingly broad spectrum of needs, ranging from the traditional HPC through data storage and archiving requirements to tools for collaboration and analytics as well as offering ‘on premises’ cloud and web-based data science tools. The post holder will join a strong and dynamic group of Research Data Scientists, Research Software Engineers, Research Applications Specialists and DevOps Engineers with a particular focus on supporting researchers. While this post is funded by and its priorities set by the IIDSAI, the post holder will be operationally based (and line managed) in the Research Software Group (RSG) in ARC.
Executive Director, Princeton Quantum Initiative - Princeton University, Princeton NJ USA
The Princeton Quantum Initiative (PQI), a newly established administrative support structure, seeks an Executive Director (ED) to advance its mission of facilitating quantum research initiatives at Princeton. PQI's mission is to bring together the vibrant community of faculty and students across engineering and the natural sciences who work on a wide range of topics in quantum information science. The Executive Director (ED) will work with two co-Directors in devising and executing the strategic direction of the initiative. The ED will act as a creative problem solver, will help to envision and develop new programming, coordinate new interdisciplinary initiatives, and establish and manage marketing and branding strategies. The ED will develop and manage the initiative's budget in coordination with the Directors, oversee grant proposal production, and handle day-to-day operations. Responsibilities also include cultivating research collaborations, managing communications, representing the Directors at meetings and public events, and overseeing reporting for both University and external stakeholders.
Assistant Director for Research and Data Education, Ruth Lilly Medical Library - Indiana University, Indianapolis IN USA
This position oversees our research team (Scholarly Communications Librarian, Data Services Librarian, and Research Metrics Librarian) which supports and tracks research efforts across IUSM (Indiana University School of Medicine) such as assisting with grant proposals, electronic lab notebooks, scholarly communication, artificial intelligence initiatives, and data management plan requirements. This position also coordinates with Research Affairs to support research initiatives within IUSM. This is a tenure-track faculty position that will report to the Associate Director of Public Services. IUSM is the nation’s largest medical school with nine campuses throughout Indiana. This school is one of the nation’s premiere medical schools and is an innovative leader in medical education, research, and clinical care.Serves as the lead from the library on rigor and reproducibility initiatives for the school, such as, ORCID, electronic lab notebooks, and data management plans. Maintains awareness of the full research life cycle to inform library services to Research Affairs. Identifies and cultivates opportunities for partnerships with intramural and extramural academic departments, centers and institutes and other stakeholders to enhance library services and resources. Works collaboratively with stakeholders to develop and revise programs, ensuring they effectively respond to evolving information needs and align with strategic partnership opportunities.
Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) Program Director - University of Colorado, Boulder CO USA
The Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) Program Director serves as the primary point of contact, overseer, and subject matter expert on developing, implementing, and managing the research-related Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) Research Program. The Director is responsible for managing program activities, developing and implementing policies, and monitoring campus compliance with specific Executive Orders and other legal mandates related to CUI. The program's scope is campus-wide, aiming to protect CUI received from or generated on behalf of the US government with a specific focus on research. This position reports to the Associate Vice Chancellor for Research Integrity and Compliance, under the Research & Innovation Office (RIO), with a dotted line to the CU Boulder Information Security Officer within the Office of Information Technology (OIT).
Head of Data (TransiT) - University of Glasgow, Glasgow UK
The University of Glasgow is leading TransiT, a new UK research hub dedicated to digital twinning for transport decarbonisation. TransiT brings together 8 leading universities and 67 industry partners and was formed through an EPSRC and Stakeholder commitment of £46M. In addition, this national Hub as one of UKRIs largest investments into digital twinning, is responsible for supporting the coordination of other strategic investments into digital twinning, towards securing UK capability and capacity building in digital Twinning for critical networks and services. The Head of Data (TransiT) will lead on the hubs data and software applications strategy, implementation and governance. The appointee, supported by the Transit cross-institutional support team, technical service staff and researchers, will lead the design, implementation and management of the digital environment that will support the 8 University Partners to engage in secure, and creative digital twinning research. They will ensure efficient, sustainable and innovative operation of data and applications services across the Hub. This includes responsibility for ensuring regulatory compliance and maintenance of trusted research practices.
Stephen Hawking Centre Research Software Engineering Project Manager - University of Cambridge, Cambridge UK
You will provide senior-level expertise to oversee the employment and coordination of RSEs based within the Stephen Hawking Centre and participating research groups. The role facilitates RSE teamwork in the areas of testing, profiling and optimising parallel code in preparation for production runs on external High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities, notably improving parallel scaling. The role advises Faculty members on grant applications for RSE support and hardware procurement and offers support through RSE-based assistance.
Lead Architect, Research Computing Infrastructure Work Team - University of Arizona, Tucson AZ USA
This position reports to the Sr. Director of Research and Discovery Technologies (RT) and is responsible for leadership in the architecting, managing, and operations of the University’s Research Computing services and infrastructure (both on-prem and in the Cloud). The Lead Architect leads the work of the RT infrastructure work team, which is responsible for the university’s enterprise research computing services infrastructure, including but not limited to High Performance Computing (HPC), Controlled and Regulated Research Services (ITAR/CUI/HIPAA/PHI), and data center operations. This position is part of RT’s leadership team and works collaboratively and in partnership with other members of the leadership team.
Strategic Programs Manager for High Performance Computing Initiatives - Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge TN USA
The SPM for HPC Initiatives position presents a unique opportunity to work with world-class laboratory facilities and talented R&D professionals conducting both classified and unclassified R&D supporting multiple Federal Agencies including the Department of Energy (DOE), the Department of Defense (DoD) Air Force, and the Department of Commerce (DoC) National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Using innovative leadership and a creative mindset, the SPM will serve as a strategic technical advisor enabling CCSD to apply current and future ORNL R&D capabilities to emerging science and technology trends in these communities. The SPM will work with CCSD’s ALD, Division and Program Directors, and COO to develop and coordinate a vision/strategy regarding CSSD workforce, resources, and R&D infrastructure required to meet the mission of DOE and other customers.
Bioinformatics Lecturer and Lab Manager - University of Oregon, Eugene OR USA
The Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact is an ambitious initiative designed to fast-track scientific discoveries into innovations that improve the quality of life for people in Oregon, the nation, and the world. A lecturer in the Knight Campus Internship program will teach summer and academic term courses with the goal of preparing students for Master's level positions in academic, industry, and government labs. Lecturers teach students topics that span bioinformatics and genomics, materials science, chemistry, biochemistry, and/or chemical engineering in an experiential format. They will also assist the director in aspects of student success including participation in admissions committee, student professional and technical mentoring, engagement with the alumni network, and engagement with external partners for internship check-ins and evaluations. A small amount of research may also be conducted to stay up to date in the field, engage with external partner scientists, and inform program curriculum.
Principal Research Software Engineer, Deep Inference Fabric - Northeastern University, Boston MA USA
We are seeking a highly skilled Principal Research Software Engineer with experience in Machine Learning and Large Language Model interpretability research methods, to assist in developing the National Deep Inference Fabric, an open-source deep learning interpretability research computing infrastructure project. You will be responsible for full stack development, doing both back-end and front-end software development to help create a robust, high-throughput, highly usable, and flexible multi-tenant AI inference service to enable research nationwide. Some of the day-to-day activities include solving security, stability, integration, and performance issues involved in providing a large-scale research inference service for open-source AI models. We are looking for someone who can implement state-of-the-art parallel GPU inference methods, and incorporate them into a system with job scheduling, routing, quota management, authentication, authorization, and telemetry to create a high-performance computing infrastructure. This person should be expert in Python and working internals of PyTorch along with Unix/Linux service development, HPC/cloud environments, and all other aspects of the software development life cycle.
Director of Research Computing and Data Science - New Mexico State University, Las Cruces NM USA
The Office of the Vice President for Research at New Mexico State University (NMSU) seeks an innovative leader to serve as NMSU’s Director of Research Computing and Data Science. This position will be instrumental in advancing NMSU's mission through research, education, and capacity building in multiple areas, especially high-performance computing (HPC), cloud computing, and data science. A key aspect of this position is securing extramural research funding to sustain and grow research infrastructure and capabilities. The successful candidate will have experience writing grant proposals and building partnerships to support initiatives in HPC, data science, and/or AI/ML technologies. Ideal candidates bring extensive experience with HPC systems, HPC and AI/ML applications, and a strong background in cloud and research computing infrastructure, and practical leadership skills. The Director will oversee HPC and institutional cloud computing resources, and lead AI initiatives to support the university's emerging research needs.
Executive Director of the Virginia Modeling, Analysis, & Simulation Center - Old Dominion University, Suffolk VA USA
The Virginia Modeling, Analysis, & Simulation Center (VMASC) at Old Dominion University seeks an Executive Director with strong visionary leadership and innovation skills in Modeling and Simulation (M&S) and data analytics to grow this internationally recognized center. Responsibilities include guiding VMASC’s research initiatives, strategic planning, and operational activities and enhancing its reputation and financial sustainability. The Executive Director will lead Old Dominion University, regional, and statewide efforts to build an ecosystem of researchers, problem solvers, and entrepreneurs working in or with M&S and data analytics to solve socially important and economically valuable problems.
Coordinator of Research Computing - Georgia Southern University, Statesboro GA USA
The Coordinator of Research Computing is responsible for overseeing the operations of a high-performance computing (HPC) environment and providing technical support to researchers. This role involves managing a small team of system administrators, maintaining HPC infrastructure, and collaborating with IT and research teams to optimize computing resources.
Lead High Performance Computing Engineer - Brown University, Providence RI USA
The Lead High Performance Computing Engineer is responsible for the HPC team that manages high-performance computing (HPC) cluster, storage, and networking infrastructure. This includes, but is not limited to the integration of HPC systems with Brown’s overarching IT infrastructure, deployment and management of parallel file systems, and maintaining system security. The Lead HPC Engineer is expected to occasionally debug and possibly rewrite low-level systems software, evaluate software for potential acquisition, and work closely with vendors’ support organizations to ensure timely resolution of problems and high availability of CCV production services. In addition, occasional user support will be performed to assist in system-level application debugging/optimization.
Senior Manager - Advanced Research Computing - McMaster University, Hamilton ON CA
Reporting to the Director, Research and High-Performance Computing Support (RHPCS), the Senior Manager - Advanced Research Computing (ARC), plays a critical leadership role in the planning and delivery of advanced research computing and digital research infrastructure and services to meet the diverse needs of researchers across all Faculties and Institutes. This position leads a team of IT and research technology specialists who provide comprehensive support throughout all phases of service development, including consultation, definition, design, planning, construction, testing, delivery, and ongoing support. Working within the larger McMaster IT ecosystem, the team contributes to the model of coordinated decentralization and will deliver the most appropriate technology solutions based on the specific needs of each researcher, drawing on the IT service opportunities across campus, as well as implementing and delivering managed digital research infrastructure and services. The senior manager also has expert knowledge of the national and provincial research ecosystem and can access and integrate the various strategic opportunities available to support our researchers.
Lead for Data Research and Services - UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Lancaster UK
UKCEH is looking for a Lead for Data Research and Services to join our 600-strong team, contributing to scientific discovery and generating the data, insights and solutions that researchers, businesses and governments need to solve complex environmental challenges. You’ll be joining our Environmental Data Science (EDS) group at UKCEH Lancaster, a dynamic, multidisciplinary team of nearly 50 people at the forefront of building Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) for environmental science, all driven by UKCEH’s ambitious Digital Strategy. You’ll be leading a team of 15+ staff in the transformation of the data research and services that underpin the DRI – driving innovation and delivery of integrated data services, tools and governance across the full spectrum of UKCEH’s research programme, including our large data programmes FDRI, NC-UK and EIDC, in alignment with broader DRI and infrastructure initiatives (e.g., across UKRI).
Director, Research Computing - George Mason University, Fairfax VA USA
The George Mason University Director of Research Computing leads the mission, vision and strategy for cyberinfrastructure (CI) services and investments in alignment with the strategic vision of the University, Office of Research and ITS. The Director is responsible for recruiting, training, and retaining a team that designs, implements, and monitors the University’s research computing systems. The Director handles the development of high-performance computing (HPC) clusters, cloud implementation, data storage and transfer services for fundamental, sensitive, and secure computing systems, to include GCC and GCC high environments. The Director regularly engages with Academic units, ITS, Library and research leadership on institutional-wide strategy and investments. The Director builds and maintains relationships with the faculty and the various stakeholders to include computing partners in the Office of Research Integrity and Compliance.
Director of the Data Science, AI, and Translation Institute - Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD USA
The inaugural Director of the new data science, AI, and translation Institute is the scientific leader and operational head of the Institute. In this capacity, they will provide the intellectual vision, strategic leadership, and oversee the operational and financial management for the Institute, its members, and its diverse research and entrepreneurial efforts. In collaboration with JHU faculty, the Director will develop, articulate, and advance the scientific vision required to attract talent, funding, and partners to the Institute. The Director will lay the groundwork for the development of the Institute into a key strategic asset for JHU. They will promote collaboration and cooperation across the University and affiliated institutions, leveraging internal and external resources and opportunities to create a distinctive profile and impact within the global scientific community.
Lead Engineering Manager - Cancer Research UK, London UK
As a Lead Engineering Manager you will directly line manage, lead, and motivate our CRM & Marketing Development and Support teams across various disciplines and levels (c. 6-8 direct reports). This will involve supporting the team to decommission our legacy platforms and develop the skills they need to work with Salesforce, thus setting up their careers for future success.
Director of Bioinformatics - Tampa General Hospital, Tampa FL USA
The Director of Bioinformatics will develop and maintain Bioinformatics Core (BIC) in order to advance and integrate precision medicine approaches into the clinical and research missions of Tampa General Hospital across all entities. The Director will develop a vision and strategy for the BIC in order to manage, analyze and integrate diverse data streams (genomics, proteomics, metabolomics) to support academic and clinical missions of TGH community. Responsibilities include recruiting, training, and supervising staff and organizing the Information Technologies infrastructure to execute core BIC objectives.
Assistant Director, Research Collaborative Services - Technology Services - University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, Urbana IL USA
The Assistant Director of Research Collaborative Services is a strategic leadership role focused on enhancing research productivity and innovation through cross-campus collaboration. Unlike traditional service-driven roles, this position prioritizes building partnerships and facilitating collaboration across various research support units, including engaging with fellow directors and key stakeholders throughout the university. The Assistant Director plays a vital role in creating a unified approach to research support, fostering a culture of cooperation, and integrating services that directly support the university's strategic goals.
Director of Research IT Services - University of California San Diego, San Diego CA USA
The Director conceives, develops, deploys, and directs a research computing and data (RCD) program for UC San Diego to meet the needs of faculty, research staff, Postdocs and graduate and undergraduate students conducting research. The Director maintains awareness of the current landscape of research digital technology infrastructure support needs and emerging trends to build out additional components, conducts gap analyses. In addition, the Director collaborates with faculty, schools, and departments to identify needed services, develops and runs pilot programs for a variety of IT services and tools to meet RCD needs. The Director guides process development, testing, and documentation for solutions and develops best practices for researcher activities and for research IT support. The Director represents the unit and participates in committees, organizations and working groups across the campus, including UC San Diego Health, Systemwide, and in national and international organizations. The Director also manages and directs a Research IT team composed of high-level technical professionals.