Overview
Computational Systems Biology Researcher (R2)
Join to apply for the Computational Systems Biology Researcher (R2) role at Barcelona Supercomputing Center
Job Reference: 503_25_LS_CB_R2
Closing Date: Thursday, 18 September, 2025
About BSC
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) is the leading supercomputing center in Spain. It houses MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, was a founding and hosting member of the former European HPC infrastructure PRACE, and is now hosting entity for EuroHPC JU. The mission of BSC is to research, develop and manage information technologies to facilitate scientific progress. BSC combines HPC service provision and R&D in computer and computational science with over 1000 staff from 60 countries.
Context and mission
The Laboratory of Open Computer Architecture (LOCA) at Barcelona Supercomputing Center aims to lead the research and development of European open software and hardware stacks based on the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture for Exascale and beyond. LOCA collaborates with BSC’s scientific departments to produce highly optimized grand challenge scientific applications in climate modelling, personalized medicine and energy. In the Life Sciences area, we are looking for a Researcher to work in computational systems biology approaches to simulate biological networks at different time-scales and to develop efficient multi-scale simulators that leverage parallel and distributed HPC environments. Tools will enable simulation of real-sized organs with heterogeneous microenvironments and bridge intracellular pathways to organ-level. The Researcher will provide HPC solutions to scale-up multi-scale simulation tools and co-design these tools to BSC’s RISC-V and other architectures. The role involves collaboration across groups to co-design novel tools for new computer architectures in the context of BSC’s Severo Ochoa award period.
Key duties
* Perform design and implementation of efficient HPC solutions to simulate multi-scale biological processes using large-scale CPU resources.
* Optimize code for HPC platforms and maintain software performance.
* Co-design multi-scale simulation tools for BSC’s RISC-V and other heterogeneous architectures.
* Co-design simulation tools for accelerators such as GPUs, vectorisation and stencil.
* Develop and deploy unit tests to study scalability and efficiency of co-designed code.
* Develop a CI / CD suite to test and deploy code across EuroHPC centres.
* Provide technical expertise in parallel and distributed computing and software performance.
* Characterize core applications and contribute to KPI definitions for performance improvements.
* Collaborate with multidisciplinary teams to optimize domain applications on BSC-designed RISC-V HPC processors and enhance the full HPC stack.
Qualifications
Education
PhD in Computer Science or a related topic, with strong background in parallel and distributed computing.
* Essential knowledge and professional experience
* Proven experience in computer science.
* Strong background in scientific computing, scaling up tools and performance analysis in HPC.
* Very strong programming skills, in particular C++ and Python.
* Administrative level experience in Linux / Unix systems.
* Additional knowledge and professional experience
* Interest in computational biology and simulation of biological processes.
* Experience in preparation and presentation of scientific projects.
* Experience in reporting progress.
* Experience in mentoring / advising PhD students.
* Good communication skills in English (verbal and written).
* Competences
* Ability to communicate technical concepts to non-experts.
* Proactive and able to take initiative.
* Creative thinking.
* Independent worker who also enjoys collaboration.
Conditions
Location: BSC Life Sciences Department. Full-time contract (37.5h / week) with a stimulating environment, flexible hours, training plan, restaurant tickets, private health insurance and relocation support. Duration: Open-ended contract tied to project and budget. Holidays: 23 paid vacation days plus 24th and 31st December per collective agreement. Salary: competitive, according to experience and cost of living in Barcelona. Starting date: 01 / 10 / 2025.
Applications procedure
All applications must be submitted via the BSC website and include:
* Full CV in English with contact details
* Cover / motivation letter in English specifying area / topics and two references
* Applications without the required document will not be considered.
Equality and recruitment
BSC is an equal opportunity employer. We promote Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and ensure gender-balanced recruitment panels. We follow Open, Transparent and Merit-based Recruitment (OTM-R) principles. For questions, contact
Deadline
The vacancy remains open until a suitable candidate is hired. Applications will be reviewed regularly.
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