HPC Systems Administrator

About the role

The University of Chicago is seeking a highly qualified HPC Systems Security Engineer to join the HPC Systems and Operations team. This position is responsible for the operation, maintenance, security, and compliance of large-scale complex HPC systems primarily used for research.

Responsibilities

• Designs, deploys, configures, and administers CPU/GPU HPC clusters, including management and compute nodes, storage infrastructure, interconnects such as InfiniBand, and physical infrastructure in the datacenter and related systems.
• Maintains complex systems and network administration functions. Works with moderated guidance to administer simple systems and assists in the administration of larger systems.
• Maintains all supporting documentation for comprehensive operating system, hardware and software configuration.
• Monitors primary responses for information technology related security incidents and violations.
• Plans and installs necessary patches and upgrades for servers and their associated storage, network, communications, and peripheral sub-systems.
• Installs and maintains appropriate level of intrusion detection, monitoring, and auditing software as required.
• Tracks compliance and maintains documentation for hardware, software, and service inventories for management reports.

Requirements

This is a hybrid position requiring at least 3 days working onsite. The individual must have a college or university degree in a related field and 5-7 years of work experience in a related job discipline. Knowledge and skills developed through this experience include Linux system administration, GPU infrastructure, scripting with Python or Bash, and implementing monitoring tools.

Qualifications

• Experience Linux system administration in a large, distributed computing environment.
• Demonstrated experience and knowledge of system security and best practices.
• Knowledge of at least one distributed storage system, including Storage Scale, Lustre, Gluster, BeeGFS, Ceph, and practical experience.
• Writing precise and concise documentation, standard operating procedures.

Skills and Knowledge

• Knowledge of Linux administration, preferably RHEL/Rocky.
• Administration of GPU infrastructure, such as tuning, driver updates, performance monitoring, etc.
• Solid skills in scripting with Python or Bash.
• Installing, configuring, and managing job schedulers, such as Slurm, Torque, PBS, and LSF.
• Automation tools such as Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Salt.
• Provisioning tools, including xCAT, Confluent, and Warewulf.
• Implementing monitoring tools, such as CheckMK, Zabbix, Nagios, Prometheus, and Grafana.
• Knowledge of at least one distributed storage system, including Storage Scale, Lustre, Gluster, BeeGFS, Ceph, and practical experience.
• Understanding and translating researchers' scientific goals into computational requirements.
• Working, documenting and enforcing controls required to protect controlled unclassified information, such as NIST 800-53, NIST 800-171, NIST SP 800-223, and FIPS.
• Strong analytical skills and problem-solving ability.

Benefits

The University of Chicago offers a wide range of benefits programs and resources for eligible employees, including health, retirement, and paid time off. Information about the benefit offerings can be found in the Benefits Guidebook.