System Benchmarking R&D Engineer

What you will do

The Compute System Architecture Unit (CSA) at imec is researching next-generation large-scale heterogeneous computer architectures for next-generation Artificial Intelligence (AI). The team is responsible for algorithm research, runtime management innovations, performance modeling, architecture simulation and prototyping for these future applications and the future systems to execute them, in order to reach multiple orders of magnitude better performance, energy-efficiency, and total-cost-of-ownership. We are looking for an R&D engineer to contribute hands-on to the performance analysis of machine learning training hardware. From local workstations with accelerators to large GPU servers, cloud-hosted emerging hardware or in-house developed prototypes, you will analyze the performance primitives through designing and running microbenchmarks, as well as optimized full benchmark suites like MLPerf, SPEC and other industry standards. You will instrument code, analyze performance counters, record energy consumption, and use profiling frameworks to feed data into performance models for our next-generation system architecture exploration. You will identify key bottlenecks, help understand scaling limitations, and compare state-of-the art approaches in machine learning training hardware. You'll help build the next generation AI hardware at scale.

What we do for you

We offer you the opportunity to join one of the world’s premier research centers in nanotechnology at its headquarters in Leuven, Belgium. With your talent, passion and expertise, you’ll become part of a team that makes the impossible possible. Together, we shape the technology that will define the society of tomorrow. We are committed to being an inclusive employer (http://www.imec-int.com/en/careers#diversity) and proud of our open, multicultural, and informal working environment with ample possibilities to take initiative and show responsibility. In everything we do, your future colleagues are guided by the imec values of passion, excellence, connectedness and integrity. We commit to supporting and guiding you in this process; not only with words but also with tangible actions. Through imec.academy, 'our corporate university', we actively invest in your development to further your technical and personal growth. We are aware that your valuable contribution makes imec a top player in its field. Your energy and commitment are therefore appreciated by means of a market appropriate salary with many fringe benefits.

Who you are

• Master’s or Doctoral degree in Computer Engineering or related field.
• You have experience with (micro)benchmarking and performance analysis on CPUs and GPUs or emerging ML accelerator architectures.
• You are familiar with in computer architecture, both at system level and microarchitectural level.
• You are strong in both low-level and parallel programming in C, C++ and preferably OpenCL or CUDA.
• Experience with higher level languages like Python and usage of tools and libraries like openMP, MPI, PyTorch, Tensorflow or other computation graph libraries are considered a strong plus.
• Experience with training machine learning models and their deployment is a strong plus (MLOps).
• You have an analytical mindset and think at an abstract level, yet you have a hands-on attitude and like to dive in deep in a problem.
• You are a constructive team player and actively share experience and knowledge with colleagues.