Posts in ASC

ASC development day, 2023 August

We had another development day (previous: ASC development day, 2023 March). It went mostly like the last one, and we have less important news for the world, but below is the summary anyway.

We have about 1550 people with accounts, with 202 new account requests in the last six months.

Most routine issues tend to be about software installation, which is good (this is the actually hard part, it’s good people ask us).

We are still on track for about 500 garage visits per year. We don’t try too hard to keep track of them all, we might get about 75% of them.

The number of interactive and Jupyter users are increasing, while Open OnDemand is decreasing. This is the wrong direction from what we’d like. We will open OOD to connections from all of Finland to make this easier.

Triton v3 is still on the way. This isn’t a new cluster, but a new operating system which individual nodes will be migrated to slowly (while maintaining the same accounts and data). Most of this happens in the background, but the change of base operating system images will require most code to be recompiled, which will require attention from many users. The transition can be made slowly, both old and new OSs will run for a time being. There won’t be a change in total amount of computing power.

An upcoming blog post will discuss this more, and the effects on users. Now is the time to start preparing. We still expect the transition to happen sometime in the autumn.

We are thinking to merge home and scratch directories, to make a common quota for both. This would improve usability by reducing the frequency of home quota affecting usage. We’d welcome any other usability suggestions.

Practically, we are using the chance to automate things even more, which should make it easier to manage in the future.

Teaching has gone well. For this academic year, we’d like to add back in a few smaller, special-purpose courses (not just to teach them, but also to get good quality video recordings for the future).

Goals:

Developing and delivering the “workflows” course with CodeRefinery

Short courses to record (e.g. rerun of debug series, once a week, record and publish).

Update Debugging linking the different debugging course repositories.

LUMI is the new EU cluster with plentyful GPU resources. A user can essentially get as many GPU resources as they need with no waiting, but since the GPUs are AMD, there is some initial barrier. Our general feeling remains: “we won’t recommend our users directly go and use LUMI, but we recommend they talk with us first and we help them use it”.

Next steps:

Continue encouraging users to contact us.

RSEs will ask the top GPU user each week if they would like support with taking LUMI into use. We’ll go and do all the setup for them.

Slide on infoscreens around the buildings?

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The Aalto RSE hiring process

This post describes the hiring process of Aalto RSE. The goal is to make hiring more equitable by providing the background information so that everyone can apply successfully. For those not applying to us, it might still provide some valuable insight about how to market your skills as a PhD making a sideways career move. What’s said here may not apply to every organization, but it might give you some things to think about.

Disclaimer: This page is a rough average description of the past, not a promise to always do this in the future.

Aalto RSE has usually hired people who have postdoc experience and will transition to a more applied software/data/computing oriented role (as opposed to being focused on writing papers). For many people, we are the first experience of job applications post-degree and thus people have to learn how to present their skills in a new, non-academic context.

One should start by reading about us - we have lots of information publicly available about what we do and how we think. This should be understood in order to do the next steps well.

The cover letter is the most important thing we read, and the first and most important filter. It’s read before the CV.

At the level we are at, almost everyone’s CV and achievements are effectively equivalent. Does it matter who got the most fancy papers? Who has the most awards? The classes people took? When most of a person’s knowledge has come from self-study, probably not. The cover letter is the chance to interpret your skills in the context of the job you are applying for.

When reading the cover letter, the first question we ask is “does this person know what they are applying to and know why they think they are a good fit?” (It’s always interesting to get letters which clearly don’t understand the job, but on the other hand it’s an easy filter.) The first paragraph should answer this question and that the rest of the letter will go into detail about why. Start with the most important information, don’t make it hard for us.

Beyond that, talk about interests and skills as relevant to the organization. Discuss special projects, including non-academic ones or random things that you are interested in (this is especially true for us, since we are the transition from academia to practical work). Our job advertisement gives you some specific ideas that you can talk about. Anything specifically important to the job should be pointed out here and not just left in the CV.

If you don’t exactly fit the stated job requirements: here is the chance to explain it. The job requirement has to say roughly what we need (to not waste people’s time when applying, and because our hiring decisions must be justifiable based on the requirements), but there are many cases where someone with a different experience can accomplish our actual goal (as said in the job ad or found in your background research). A person that can say this, that they are adaptable, and will have a very good chance.

We have adopted some system of anonymous recruiting. We request that cover letters are submitted without identifying information (name, signature, etc) so that one person gives them numbers, and a broader group tries to take a non-biased look at them. After this initial impression, we bring in the rest of the application. Don’t make assumptions about what the reader will know about your background, just say it.

The letter should be as short as possible to get the information across. One page is usually about the shortest we get, and a bit less than two pages is typical. But if it’s engaging, we’ll read as much as you write. Remember, most important information first, don’t make us hunt for things.

Update 2024: Do you want to use AI to write your cover letter? Please think again. Since LLMs became a thing, cover letters have become harder to read, longer, and more generic-sounding. It’s better to write in your own voice and be shorter than rely on what AI gives you.

The CV serves as non-anonymous reference information, but they are hard to read and all look pretty similar. To be honest, we don’t worry that much about the format and contents here: get us basic factual information in the most efficient way. For our particular jobs, non-academic skills such as software/data tools are more important than scientific articles, etc. Remember, we are busy and have plenty of applications, make it easy to read.

Open Science isn’t just good for research, it’s good for you, too. If you can point to public repositories of work you have done, this is very useful. Things like Gitlab/Github profiles with activity and your own projects, links to data you have released, etc. They don’t have to be perfect - something is better than nothing. The best case would be a few projects which are well-done (and you know it and point them out to us), and plenty more stuff that may be of lower quality to show you can get simple stuff done simply. Not everyone is fortunate to have a field where they can practice open science throughout their career, but even publishing a project or two before they apply for a job with us is very useful.

Despite what the previous section said, we do try to dig through applications that seem on-topic but don’t say everything we are looking for, to give them the most fair shot we can.

We always need to heavily filter the list down. Some relevant filtering includes:

Do they know what job they are applying for? Can they connect their skills to the job?

Have they touched on the main points in our job advertisement and the linked “Become a RSE” page?

Are they interested in teaching, mentoring, and real collaborative projects? Do they know what kind of teaching and mentoring we do?

Is there enough knowledge about the research process?

Any relevant skills about this call’s particular topic (if there is any)?

How do their skills and experience match what our team is currently missing, regardless of the open call?

How similar has their previous work been to “research engineering” (helping the research process) instead of only focusing on academic promotion?

The recruitment team makes several passes over and we discuss how to filter down. We try to get a good variety of candidates.

Sometimes, there is some initial recorded “video interviews”, which provide some initial familiarity in both directions before the actual interviews. We know these are non-interactive and a recording isn’t a conversation so this is harder than an interview, but we consider that when watching them. One shouldn’t worry too much about these, if we do them.

Our actual interviews are not designed to be stressful. We have some prepared questions and go through them in a friendly manner. You have a chance to ask questions to use at the beginning and end (and any other time too). The questions are designed to hear about your experiences and not trick or test you.

We don’t currently ask technical challenge questions. The number of things which you’d need to know is so broad, it’s more important that you can learn things quickly. Since we usually interview relatively advanced people, we can instead look at existing projects they have done and check references, without having to do a technical challenge. This may change depending on the type of candidates we are interviewing, but just like the main interviews we are more interested in how people think, rather than raw knowledge.

In the future, there might be more “meet the team” kind of events.

We want to respond to people as soon as possible, but there’s a simple fact: we don’t want to tell anyone “no” until we are very sure we have an acceptance (we don’t want to tell someone “no” and then hire them later), and we have very many qualified candidates. So there is often an unfortunately long delay in hearing back. We hope that everyone knows within a month, though (and ideally ~2 weeks if all goes well).

We get a relatively large number of applications, with a lot of good people. So far (before 2023), we have been hiring at a relatively high level - researchers with postdoc experience who have been some sort of RSE-like experience with helping others with research (beyond only focusing on making papers for themselves) and technology. Don’t let this discourage you. There are many qualified applications, so if you don’t get selected, that doesn’t mean that you were unqualified. We look at everyone, regardless of their level, for every position. The fit to our particular job is more important that anything else, so keep trying until you get the right fit - it’s just a numbers game.

For reference, this is an older job application text, so that you can see how the things above are integrated. (to be updated with the 2023 version soon)

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Aalto Scientific Computing is looking for a

Research Software Engineer/Supporter

To a permanent, full-time position.

Are you more of a programmer than your researcher colleagues? Are you more of a researcher than commercial developers? Do you fit in both, but have a home in neither? Be a Research Software Engineer with us and find your home. If you are looking for a career path which combines the interesting parts of both fields, this is a good choice.

Aalto Scientific Computing is an elite “special forces” unit of Research IT, providing high-performance computing hardware, management, research support, teaching, and training. Our team consists of a core of PhD staff working with top researchers throughout the university. Our services are used by every school at Aalto University and known throughout Finland and the Nordics. All our work is open-source by default and we take an active part in worldwide projects.

In this position, you will:

Provide software development and consulting as a service, depending on demand from research groups.

Provide one-on-one research support from a software, programming, Linux, data, and infrastructure perspective: short-term projects helping researchers with specific tasks, so that the researchers gain competence to work independently.

As needed and depending on interest, teaching and other research infrastructure support.

Continually learn new skills as part of our team.

Primary qualifications: There are two main tracks, and candidates of diverse backgrounds are encouraged to apply – every candidate will be evaluated according to their own unique experiences.

PhD degree with research experience in some computational field and much knowledge of practical computing strategies for research, or

Software developer or computational scientist with a strong software/open source/Linux background, scientific computing experience, and some experience in research. Masters degree or similar experience.

This particular call emphasizes the ability to work in machine learning and AI environments. The ideal candidate will be working closely with machine learning researchers, and thus a background in machine learning is highly desirable.

Important skills:

Ability to tackle any problem with a researcher’s mindset and a developer’s passion for technology.

Experience or knowledge of the principles of open source software, open science, and software development tools such as version control.

Please see https://scicomp.aalto.fi/rse/become-a-rse/ for more information on what kind of skills we value - or more precisely what you are likely to learn.

What we offer:

You will join the dynamic Aalto Scientific Computing team, where you will learn from some of the best research IT specialists in Finland.

Co-working within top-quality research groups, getting experience in a wide variety of fields and developing an extensive network of scientific contacts. This includes contacts to the Aalto startup scene and community.

A way to be close to the research process while focusing on interesting computational problems and not the publication process.

Our program will offer you a chance to improve your software skills – you are expected to engage in plenty of professional development.

Open Source is our expectation. All (or most) of your code may be open source and may be added to your public CV, depending on the needs of researchers.

Salary will be according to experience, for a recently graduated PhD similar to a postdoc salary. Work hours are flexible, but are expected to sync with the audience being served. Primary workplace is Otaniemi, Espoo (Helsinki region), Finland. Aalto University has a hybrid work policy which allows 60% remote work possibility, and our team takes good advantage of this flexibility.

To apply successfully:

Please include a separate cover letter (~1-2 pages). Please try to write your cover letter avoiding information like name, gender, nationality or other demographic information that is not directly related to why you would be the right person for this position (this includes, for example, a signature on the letter) unless you think it benefits you. This will assist in anonymous recruitment possibilities. The letter should include for example:

Why being a Research Software Engineer is for you,

past research experience, if any

past technical teaching or mentoring experience,

past software development experience (even informal self-learning),

past Linux, command line, or scripting experience,

highlight one (or a few) collaborative projects you have taken part in and your role within it, and

what you bring and what you intend to learn.

A normal professional or academic CV including

a list of your technical and programming tools and level of proficiency (e.g. basic/proficient/expert). This is the time to show the breadth of your experience.

Github link or other public sample code. If not available, whatever is possible to demonstrate past programming experience. Please highlight one or two of your outstanding research software projects.

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ASC development day, 2023 March

We recently had an internal “development day”, which is a our new name for getting together to talk about longer term plans. This is our second “development day”. Overall, it went well, and we think that we are on an overall good path. There are three particular focus areas for the future:

Teaching: This was also a focus last time, and probably will still be in the future. We are overall happy with our decision last time to focus less on many small/medium courses, and instead focus on large, collaborative courses and then focused, individualized support for advanced use cases. Smaller courses happen mainly when we see specific needs that can’t be filled other ways (or we make them large, open, collaborative courses if there is a broad need).

Triton v3: The software/OS/management side of our cluster will be almost completely reworked in the next year (we aren’t getting rid of any hardware just for this). This will take a fair amount of our time, but is needed because existing systems are starting to show their age.

LUMI usage: LUMI is a flagship project of EuroHPC and provides huge resources available to the same people that can use Triton. Triton is still needed for ease of use of everyday projects, but we should actively look for people who can benefit from it and help them port to there. Our recent evaluations lead to the conclusion that our porting help is still needed there.

Teaching has long been one of the pillars of ASC’s support. It’s still needed, but the focus seems to be changing. No longer is a room with 10-20 (or ever 50) people considered a lot. People seem both more able and willing to find advanced material themselves, and more in need of basic principles (git, Python for SciComp, etc). Perhaps this is also partly caused by the remote work period emphasizing how all this material is available online anyway. Our basic philosophy:

Focus on large courses for new researchers, for example using the CodeRefinery MOOC strategy. This reaches the most people, helps the beginners the most, produces high-quality open source material for asynchronous reference, and has good possibilities for co-teaching. Example include CodeRefinery, our SciComp/HPC kickstart course, and Python for Scientific Computing.

Advanced, one-on-one, or small-group support via SciComp garage and the Research Software Engineering service. This isn’t just for projects, but is also a useful service for people learning from other advanced material in their work - basically, we work as mentors. One-on-one support is both more rewarding for us and probably more useful to the user (relative to time demands on both ends). Anyway, advanced courses often aren’t offered right when people need them, so we are left in this position anyway.

What about small/medium-sized courses, and advanced courses?

The first two points above squeeze out medium-sized courses for the most part, in our opinion. By the time our audience is an intermediate or advanced level, they seem to be able to figure things out themselves + ask for help when needed - if they can figure out what they need to do. This point deserves further study, though. Instead, we point to other existing material.

We will make sure that we have good recommendations for advanced self-study courses and generally chart out the resources so that our users don’t have to. This is mostly done by our Hands-on Scientific Computing course.

In the past, we have supported community members to give courses on topics of which they are experts. Continue this as appropriate (see the next point).

Continue the possibility of on-demand courses taught by us if someone requests them, and other smaller courses if we see a strong need. Contact us!

Triton is our HPC cluster, and is notable for being a Ship of Theseus: it’s continually upgraded while being the same cluster. This has resulted in the software running it getting a bit out of date. This software was originally developed as broader partnerships, and as these partnerships have changed, we need to take more responsibility for it ourselves.

Users shouldn’t see any major change from this, though part of it is improving our (user) software installation tools, which should make increased responsiveness to software installation requests.

As said above, Lumi is a significant resource, yet our users have not come to us asking for our help in using it. Over the past six months, we have found some Triton users who would benefit from it and helped extend their workflows to work on LUMI. We do this by first testing some applications ourselves, then looking at Triton usage for large users and reaching out directly.

Currently our focus is on GPU-intensive applications, which is made more interesting because LUMI has AMD GPUs. We’ve gotten local AMD GPUs for our own testing and in general are well prepared to support this.

While LUMI is a HPC system and has a typical HPC system interface, it serves so many different users that the software stack is very limited, so that most users need to install their own software and figure out how to run it on AMD GPUs. This is why we recommend most users access LUMI through us (we’re paid to save you time, after all), though of course anyone interested can use it directly.

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Aalto SciComp stickers and patches

We have stickers (and patches!) to support Aalto Scientific Computing. (You can get them from our IT offices in CS, NBE, and Physics) But why invest in this? Well, it’s fun, but there should be a deeper reason.

While our main goal is to maintain Aalto University Triton HPC cluster, provide courses and direct support to researchers, we cannot scale to solve all problems and make the best decisions without a community: you! Thus, our new promotional material is designed so that the members of our community can show their support for scientific computing at Aalto University. We hope that by providing a way for the community to show this interest, people can find - and support - each other better.

We have the typical hexagonal stickers, which you can use on all the typical sticker things.

We also have patches, for those who are interested - in Finland they are a big thing on [student overalls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_boilersuit), but you could also sew them on your backpack or purse. Please send us pictures to inspire us all! (some have Velcro backing for that kind) of attachment, ask us for that style.

You may notice that for the patches some have a black background and some have a white background. Black-background means “Ask me anything about the tools of scientific computing, I am happy to help or at least point you the right direction (as much as I can)!”

Here’s our idea:

Anyone may take the white background ones

Black background is for:

Aalto Scientific Computing team staff

Volunteers at our events (for example helpers at our workshops)

Anyone who is interested in using their time to help others in scientific computing (regardless of their skills)

(clever people will notice that the first two are included in the third, and actually anyone can be the third if they want).

The idea is that we, and our community, can’t work alone. Everyone needs to support each other in order to work at the level we want. The in-group experts are an undervalued resource in this, often not getting the credit or recognition they deserve in supporting everyone. This is our small method of recognizing those supporters, and we hope that in the future we support them ever more - both career-wise and supporting them in supporting others.

Yes, we should have gotten black-background stickers. We’ll do that next time…

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