Job of the Week: Data Operations Specialist at the Simons Foundation

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simonsThe Simons Foundation in New York City is seeking a Data Operations Specialist in our Job of the Week.

The Simons Foundation is beginning a new computational science organization called the Flatiron Institute. Flatiron will seek to explore challenging science problems in astrophysics, biology and chemistry. Computational science techniques involve processing and simulation activities and large-scale data analysis. This position is intended to help manage and fully exploit the data and storage resources at Flatiron to further the scientific mission.

Essential Functions/Responsibilities:

  • Manage and optimize for access large-scale analysis data sets for scientific activities.
  • Participate in storage operations, evaluations, commissioning and planning. The institute currently has more than 1PB of storage in both ceph and GPFS.
  • Contribute to the optimization of applications from a variety of scientific fields for efficient IO in a challenging environment, where the storage and processing resources may be geographically separated.
  • Provide direct user support to local and distributed communities in managing and moving data samples.
  • Participate in the development of infrastructure for operations, monitoring and accounting of data storage and access.

The Simons Foundation’s mission is to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences. Cofounded in New York City by Jim and Marilyn Simons, the foundation celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2014. The Simons Foundation at its core exists to support basic — or discovery-driven — scientific research, undertaken in pursuit of understanding the phenomena of our world. The foundation’s support of scientists generally takes the form of direct grants to individual investigators and projects, through their academic institutions. The foundation makes grants in four areas: Mathematics and Physical Sciences, Life Sciences, autism research (SFARI) and Education & Outreach. In 2013 the foundation also launched an internal research division, the Simons Center for Data Analysis. The Simons Foundation seeks to create strong collaborations and foster cross-pollination of ideas between investigators, as these interactions often lead to unexpected breakthroughs and new understanding. In an effort to directly foster such interaction between scientists, in 2012 the foundation launched a new collaborative funding model, the Simons Collaborations, which bring funded investigators — sometimes from different disciplines — together to work on a timely and important problem. To date, five Simons Collaborations have been launched in and across mathematics, physics and the life sciences. The Simons Center for Data Analysis similarly functions to unite scientists, usually across disciplines, for collaboration.

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