NESAP Postdoctoral Fellows

Through the NERSC Science Acceleration Program (NESAP), highly motivated postdoctoral scholars collaborate with scientific teams to enable and improve computational solutions to deep, meaningful problems across all program areas funded by the Department of Energy Office of Science.

Specifically, NESAP fellows work with science teams to incorporate computational performance improvements and workflow-related advanced capabilities into their simulations of complex physical systems, advanced data analytics, and machine learning at scale on energy-efficient supercomputers. 

The challenges

Advancements in computational architectures and new paradigms, such as cloud and edge computing, will enable many science teams to accelerate their workflows. These areas are of current and future importance, as outlined by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Integrated Research Infrastructure initiative. NESAP is a key step in preparing for future systems deployed at NERSC. Postdoctoral fellows hired under NESAP will target two key areas: Performance goals and advanced capability goals.

Performance

Many codes running at NERSC need to be adapted or optimized to run efficiently on GPUs. Ideally, codes ported to GPUs should be agnostic to the system vendor and readily run on other HPC DOE systems, namely Frontier and Summit. Advancements in tensor core computing and reduced precision algorithms are also some of the novel approaches potentially of interest to the science teams. These are some example performance areas to which NESAP postdocs can contribute.

Advanced capabilities

Advancements in workflow tools provide greater flexibility and efficiency to science teams. Smart scheduling, X-as-a-service, and end-to-end workflow profiling for complex workflows, similar to Superfacility projects, are exciting, advanced capability areas that can significantly transform how science teams will use and interact with NERSC. NESAP Postdoctoral Fellows work in multidisciplinary teams composed of computational and domain scientists to help incorporate these advanced capabilities into projects under NESAP. Fellows collaborate with each other across performance as well as advanced capability areas.

The rewards for fellows

NESAP has established a track record of enabling postdocs to pursue careers in data science, high performance computing (HPC), and scientific computing in industry and at national labs.