High performance computing for the study of nanoscale light-matter interactions

The Inria Sophia Antipolis - Méditerranée center counts 37 research teams and 9 support departments. The center's staff (about 600 people including 400 Inria employees) is composed of scientists of different nationalities (250 foreigners of 50 nationalities), engineers, technicians and administrators. 1/3 of the staff are civil servants, the others are contractual. The majority of the research teams at the center are located in Sophia Antipolis and Nice in the Alpes-Maritimes. Six teams are based in Montpellier and a team is hosted by the computer science department of the University of Bologna in Italy. The Center is a member of the University and Institution Community (ComUE) "Université Côte d'Azur (UCA)".

Atlantis is  a joint project-team  between Inria and  the Jean-Alexandre Dieudonné Mathematics Laboratory at  Université Côte d'Azur. The team  gathers applied mathematicians and  computational scientists who are collaboratively undertaking  research activities aiming at the design, analysis, development and  application of innovative numerical methods for systems of  partial differential equations (PDEs) modelling nanoscale light-matter interaction problems. In this context, the team is  developing  the   DIOGENeS  [https://diogenes.inria.fr/]  software suite,  which  implements  several Discontinuous  Galerkin  (DG)  type methods tailored to the systems  of time- and frequency-domain Maxwell equations  possibly coupled  to  differential  equations modeling  the behaviour of propagation  media at optical frequencies.  DIOGENeS is a unique  numerical   framework  leveraging   the  capabilities   of  DG techniques  for  the simulation  of  multiscale  problems relevant  tonanophotonics and nanoplasmonics.

The main objective in this assignment is to further enhance the high performance computing capabilities of the  numerical tools developed in the DIOGENeS software suite. 

The recruited engineer will also actively participate in the studies conducted by the Atlantis team members for demonstrating the benefits of these numerical tools  through the simulation of realistic and challenging use cases pertaining to various applications of nanoscale light-matter interactions. In particular, the team is now actively collaborating with potential end-users of the DIOGENeS software suite who are raising various modeling issues that need to be addressed prior to simulating such realistic uses cases. 

Concretely, this will concern two components of DIOGENeS:

• On one hand, the DG-type high order finite element solvers for solving the differential models of nanophotonics. Here, the goal will be to develop GPU and multi-GPU-enabled versions of the compute intensive numerical kernels of these solvers;
• On the other hand, the inverse design workflows for mastering and enhancing  the properties of nanophotonic structures and devices. Here, the goal will be to develop and implement parallelization strategies for a statistical learning-based global optimization method, which is coupled to the above-mentioned DG-type high order finite element solvers.

Candidates will  hold a Master degree or a PhD degree in applied mathematics/scientific computing or computational wave physics or computational photonics.

Required skills:
- Sound knowledge of numerical analysis and development of finite element  type methods for computational physics;
- A concrete experience in numerical modeling for computational electromagnetics  will be an asset;

- Strong programming skills and exposure to high performance computing models (MPI, OpenMP/OpenACC, CUDA);

- Knowledge and experience of Fortran 95/2000x and Python programming languages;

- Fluent spoken and written English.

• Subsidised catering service
• Partially-reimbursed public transport
• Social security
• Paid leave
• Flexible working hours
• Sports facilities

From 2652 euros gross monthly (according to degree and experience)