42) Careers in computational science and scientific computing

42) Careers in computational science and scientific computing#

  1. National Labs

  2. Industrial R&D

  3. Academia

  4. Research Software Engineering

  5. Personal resources

1. National Labs#

  • Department of Energy

    • Office of Science (Berkeley, Argonne, Pacific Northwest, …)

    • National Nuclear Security Administration (Livermore, Los Alamos, Sandia)

    • Office of Renewable Energy (NREL)

  • National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

    • Weather and climate, operational numerical weather prediction and research

  • National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)

    • Comprehensive climate focus (includes ocean, sea ice, land ice, land)

  • National Institute of Standards and Technology

    • Fundamental materials (e.g., gas equations of state), metrology

  • National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

    • Earth research, especially remote sensing (satellite and aerial)

    • Fluid and structural mechanics for safe, reliable, efficient flight (includes partnerships with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA))

    • Materials science and engineering (overlapping scope with industry)

Examples of lab/agency-led software#

  • HPC Middleware (MPI implementations, resource managers)

  • Numerical Libraries (PETSc, hypre, Sundials, Trilinos, MFEM)

  • Open source simulation applications (MOOSE library, LAMMPS, Nek, Albany)

  • Internal/export controlled simulation (BLAST, FUN3D, Sierra, MCNP, MOOSE apps)

  • Community Earth System Model (NCAR), Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM)

  • Some orgs publicly embrace open source LLNL Open Source

2. Industrial R&D#

  • Hardware vendors and cloud providers: CUDA, HIP, SYCL, OpenMP, MPI

    • “Science/engineering should use our programming models/run fast on our hardware”

    • “Data science” (statistical computing) should also be fast

  • High-stakes methods development

  • Research papers in specific venues are valuable

  • Windows into industrial research culture

    • Who participates in comparison studies, standards organizations, etc.?

    • Who attends technical conferences (not trade shows) and holds elected positions in professional societies?

3. Academia#

  • Tenure-track

    • Teaching

    • External funding is mainly to support students and research staff

    • Eternally swimming in hats

  • Research faculty/research software engineer

    • Usually reliant on external grants, often a “center”

    • There are some “research software engineering” facility/service groups (e.g., Princeton) that may serve several projects. On the other hand, there are positions that are project specifc. See a few examples below:

    • The Institute of Computing for Climate Science (ICCS) at the University of Cambridge

    • CU Institutes (CIRES, INSTAAR, LASP, JILA, BioFrontiers, …)

    • CliMA

    • VESRI

4. Research Software Engineering#

5. Personal Resources#

You can find a talk on my website that I gave a few years ago to my Alma Mather. Let’s give a look together at the slides.

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