Context:

The African Supercomputing Center (ASCC) is a new entity in the Univervisty Mohamed VI Polytechnic (UM6P) aimed at providing HPC services to the research community in Morocco and the African continent.

The ASCC is home to the largest HPC infrastructure in Africa. This cutting-edge platform, based on the latest technologies in the HPC world, can deliver a performance of 3.15 PF.

The ASCC wants for these resources to be open to African researchers, academics and entrepreneurs, with promising projects in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics, Genomics, Food Security, Agriculture and Mining.

Our vision is to create at UM6P a world class research infrastructure, to solve African research problems in both academia and industry and create the next generation of computational scientists and digital entrepreneurs.

Roles and responsibilities

• Responsible for working with members of the University, OCP group and other key stakeholders to deliver a world-class High-Performance Computing Service.
• Play a significant role in setting processes and methods to ensure Service Level Agreements are met.
• Manage a team of experts and operators in charge of system administration, user support and platform maintenance.
• Work with senior researchers to develop new services, and assist in the effort of outreach to other universities, industry and international partners.
• Collaborate with Scientific Computing experts in developing commercial offers around HPC, Modelisation and Data Science services.
• Help in organizing webinars and events with industry around HPC.
• Organize themed events to showcase how HPC can bring value to research and industry.
• Control costs and budgets regarding HPC systems
• Negotiate Vendor Contracts (platforms, software licenses, network equipments and links…)
• Oversee maintenance and optimize networks and servers
• Assess system performance and recommend improvements
• Develop Department Policies and practices
• Resolve Help Desk Escalations
• Oversee Upgrades and Installations
• Hire approriate resources to achieve the departments objectives
• Manage a team of Systems Administrators, Help Desk operators and external consultants
• Ensure data is handled, transferred or processed according to legal and university guidelines

Mandatory Experience

• At least 10 years’ experience in the ICT industry with delivery of services in challenging environments
• Master’s Degree or equivalent in Information Technology, Computer Science, Telecoms, or any similar field
• Extensive experience with managing multi-disciplinary technical teams
• Strong written and verbal communicators, able to communicate with team members, management personnel, and end users throughout the organization
• Ability to communicate and explain complex technical concepts to non-technical audiences
• Excellent problem-solving skills, especially when it comes to directly addressing user issues with software, hardware, and servers
• Experience in the following fields:
  • Linux and windows server environments
  • Hosting services (Virtualisation, Containers…)
  • Network services
  • IT service management
  • Setting IT processes in high performance environments

Preferred Experience

• Datacenter Services
• High Performance Computing
• Network administration in Datacenter Environments
• Data-Science
• Scientific Computation
• Experience in marketing and presales will be a plus.