High performance computing expert

Job Description: HPCExpert( Must have SC Security clearance)

Pay: £450-500 per day PAYE 600-700 Umbrella

Location: Nottingham /Derby

Start date: ASAP

Role Overview

This role provides high-level consultancy and first hand engineering expertise to modernise High Performance Computing (HPC) environments with a focus on containerisation of HPC and HPC/ML workloads, cluster optimisation, and MPI aware workflows.

Responsibilities include assessing the existing HPC infrastructure, advising on best practice for container strategies, and delivering technical recommendations based on real workloads.

Key Responsibilities

The ideal candidate will collaborate with the customer to assess existing HPC infrastructure and workloads through various customer workshops and interviews, to identify:

HPC Environment Assessment & Optimization

• Conduct rapid reviews of existing HPC infrastructure, including Beowulf clusters, Slurm job schedulers, workflow execution patterns, and key use cases.
• Analysis of current HPC/ML workloads and identification of performance constraints, containerisation opportunities, and runtime optimisation options.

HPC Containerisation Strategy

• Produce a strategy for MPI optimised container images using tools such as Apptainer/Singularity (SIF), OpenMPI, Podman, and Buildah.
• As part of the report's findings, outline repeatable, secure build pipelines for HPC workloads.
• Identify in the report opportunities to align container platforms with HPC orchestration requirements (batch, interactive, scientific workflows).

Technical Workshops, Stakeholder Engagement

• Lead technical discussions, workshops, and training sessions to up skill engineering and research teams on containerisation and HPC best practices.
• Produce concise written reports outlining the recommendations and findings, use cases, future strategy, HPC market view along with next steps, and architectural patterns.

HPCTools, Runtimes & Ecosystem Integration

• Have a good understanding of Slurm scheduling, MPI job patterns, JupyterHub/JupyterLab for data science workflows, GPU scheduling tools such as Run:AI, and SDLC practices tailored to research/HPC environments.

Essential Skills & Experience

• Proven background in high performance computing, including hands on use of Beowulf style cluster environments.
• Strong practical knowledge of Slurm job scheduling and MPI job optimisation.
• Demonstrated experience with MPI aware container technologies (Apptainer/SIF, OpenMPI, Podman, Buildah).
• Ability to run structured interviews, technical workshops, and cross team engineering sessions.
• Experience supporting typical HPC, ML, and scientific workloads.
• SCClearance and UK only nationality is frequently required for HPC consulting roles within defence/aerospace environments.

Desirable Experience

• Knowledge of CFD software (e.g., OpenFOAM).
• Familiarity with Kubernetes or Singularity as HPC runtime, GPU slicing, and image lifecycle governance.
• Experience contributing written outputs such as market assessments of HPC container technologies.

Call Steve Hill on

IND/LET