August 20, 2020 - by CSCS
Nationality
Brazilian
Working at CSCS since
October 2016
Background
- 2009-2010 Lecturer, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil
- 2010-2014 Doctor in Chemistry, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil
- 2012-2013 PhD Exchange Program, The University of Utah, USA
- 2014-2016 Postdoctoral training, Laboratory of Physical Chemistry, ETH Zurich
Specialised in
As part of the User Enagagement and Support Unit, I work towards enabling our scientific community to make the best use of the HPC environment. On the support role I help the users with their needs and contribute to the scientific software stack management tools, to a monitoring tool, and to a framework for regression testing and continuous integration of HPC applications. I also work on a particle simulation library which will empower research on different scientific fields. Furthermore, I have been involved in outreach activities as hackathons, teaching, and leading seminars.
Working at CSCS means to me
To contribute to the scientific and HPC community on a global scale and engage in solving dynamic and interesting challenges, all while helping our users to best utilize the resources in order to run applications efficiently on one of the biggest supercomputer systems in the world.
What I like most about my work
I like its dynamic environment. I work in a multi-discipline, multi-cultural software engineering team that provides direct support and proposes solutions to our users’ problems. The team is comprised of skilled individuals whose knowledge spans the whole software stack, from systems and computer architecture to scientific applications. There is no regular routine or programming language. One day I can help a user to setup a complex simulation workflow, then code an application in C++, then contribute to a Python-based project, and interact with sci-entists about their challenges. I like the possibility of digging deep into very complex scientific software while still being able to communicate and interact with people at different levels and help our users, so they can focus on the science while running optimally on our system.
What challenges me at my work
As a member of a production engineering team that monitors the end-user software performance in our systems, it is part of my responsibility to know when/how/what impacts the application’s performance, work towards the understanding of the root causes, propose solutions and deploy automatic monitoring systems to alert potential incidents. Due to the number and variety of scientific software in our center and the complexity and scale of our machines, this is a big challenge. Furthermore, we also interact directly with the users. We see first-hand the challenges they face. So, we are always in pursuit of solutions that can empower them and allow efficient use of our resources, as well as make their interactions with the system and us easier.