PhD Intern - Scale-out Runtime Developer

Overview

The Physical and Computational Sciences Directorate (PCSD) researchers lead major R&D efforts in experimental and theoretical interfacial chemistry, chemical analysis, high energy physics, interfacial catalysis, multifunctional materials, and integrated high-performance and data-intensive computing.

PCSD is PNNL’s primary steward for research supported by the Department of Energy’s Offices of Basic Energy Sciences, Advanced Scientific Computing Research, and Nuclear Physics, all within the Department of Energy's Office of Science.

Additionally, Directorate staff perform research and development for private industry and other government agencies, such as the Department of Defense and NASA. The Directorate's researchers are members of interdisciplinary teams tackling challenges of national importance that cut across all missions of the Department of Energy.

Responsibilities

The Future technology Computing group seeks PhD interns for the summer of 2025 with a strong background in distributed runtime system (especially one targeting HPC scientific workflows), modern C/C++ programming, and system software development in general. Knowledge in disaggregated memory is preferred but not strictly required. The duration of the internship is 3 months. The internship can be either remote or onsite based on the availability of the candidate. The candidate will be expected to use and familiarize themselves with world leading technologies which are available at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Moreover, the candidate is expected to collaborate closely with domain scientists and computer scientists. The expected outcome involves high quality research work, represented by papers and/or prototype implementations.
 
Responsibilities and Accountabilities

• Develop scheduling fine-grained task policies for massive parallel distributed clusters.
• Develop classical and novel low-cost synchronization constructs for both shared and distributed computing.
• Assist in the development of job stealing techniques both intra and inter node.
• Help on the design of dynamic resource scheduling algorithms.

Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications:

• Candidates must be currently enrolled/matriculated in a PhD program at an accredited college.
• Minimum GPA of 3.0 is required.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Strong knowledge of C/C++, especially with the extension for parallel programming: Pthreads, OpenMP, C++ threads, etc.
• Research experience preferred.
• Experience with distributed workflows written in MPI.
• Experience with disaggregated memories and concurrent programming.