Maintenance and Deployment of Scientific Applications on Cloud Infrastructure

SOLEIL is the French synchrotron radiation facility, located on the Saclay plateau near Paris. It is a multidisciplinary instrument and research laboratory, whose mission is to conduct research programs using synchrotron radiation, to develop cutting-edge instrumentation on beamlines and to make these beamlines available to the scientific community. The SOLEIL synchrotron, a unique tool for both academic research and industrial applications, opened in 2008. It is used annually by several thousand French and foreign researchers, across a wide range of disciplines such as physics, biology, chemistry, astrophysics, environment, earth sciences, etc. SOLEIL relies on a radiation source remarkable for both its brilliance and stability. This Very Large Research Infrastructure (TGIR), a partner of the University of Paris-Saclay, is incorporated as a "civil" company founded jointly by the CNRS and the CEA.

Team Overview

This job description is not exhaustive. It covers the main responsibilities and is subject to change. The position is located within the SOLEIL Experimental Data Reduction and Analysis Group (GRADES), composed of five permanent staff members. GRADES's mission is to provide experimental stations with the means to process their data. This includes the provision of scientific data reduction and analysis software, data processing services (notebooks, remote working environments), methods and documentation, training, etc. As part of the cross-functional IT activities for the SOLEIL Upgrade, the VISA project is required to support data processing environments. This position aims to provide and maintain the scientific applications made available in VISA.

Mission

Your mission will be to contribute to the maintenance and deployment of scientific applications on the VISA cloud computing infrastructure. This computing service, accessible from a web browser, provides a remote desktop with pre-installed applications and access to experimental data. The scientific applications will be assembled into software packages and then made available in virtual machines. Tools will be developed to automate integration testing (CI/CD) and deployment. An evaluation of the software's performance and functionality will be conducted in partnership with the experimental stations to validate the methodology. You will work closely with beam-line scientists and engineers both at SOLEIL and at other facilities involved in similar projects.

Responsibilities and Tasks

1. Deployment of scientific software on virtual machines: You will participate in the application assembly of virtual machines. You will define procedures for deploying scientific software on virtual environments, in the form of packages and containers.

2. Testing and Continuous Integration: You will define software testing procedures and integrate them into the software factory. You will monitor software quality.

3. Maintenance and Packaging of Scientific Software: You will ensure software maintenance, particularly bug resolution and updating the software repositories used for package generation. You will identify new requirements and participate in their deployment.

4. Documentation Writing (installation/testing/tutorials): You will transcribe installation and testing procedures into company documentation. You will participate in writing educational examples of software usage for scientists.

5. User Support: You will assist cloud service users with the scientific application components.

6. You may be required to supervise interns, doctoral students, and postdocs.

7. You will be required to participate in national/international conferences and projects. Education and Experience The candidate's profile corresponds to an engineer or doctoral candidate in scientific computing, physics, or mathematics with a sound understanding of software packaging mechanisms, virtual machines, and containerization.

Education and Experience

The candidate's profile corresponds to an engineer or doctoral candidate in scientific computing, physics, or mathematics with a sound understanding of software packaging mechanisms, virtual machines, and containerization.