Huawei is a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider. Through our constant dedication to customer-centric innovation and strong partnerships, we have established leading end-to-end capabilities and strengths across the carrier networks, enterprise, consumer, and cloud computing fields. Our products and solutions have been deployed in over 170 countries serving more than one third of the world’s population.

With 20+ sites across Europe and 1500 researchers, Huawei’s European Research Institute (ERI) oversees fundamental and applied technology research, academic research cooperation projects, and strategic technical planning across our network of European R&D facilities. Huawei’s ERI includes the new Zurich Research Center (ZRC), located in Zurich, Switzerland. A major element of ZRC is a new research laboratory focused on fundamental research in the area of computing systems, spanning new hardware, new software, and new algorithms.

The research work of the lab will be carried out not only by Huawei’s internal research staff but also by our academic research partners in universities across Europe. The lab will provide an open research environment where academics will be encouraged to visit and work on fundamental long-term research alongside Huawei staff in an environment that, like the best universities and research institutes, is open and conducive to such scientific work.

For this new ZRC Laboratory, we are seeking candidates for two industrial post-doc positions as:

Researcher on Optimal Hypergraph Partitioning for Scheduling (12 months)

Hypergraph partitioning is useful across a great variety of domains, including high performance computing, Deep Learning, graph analytics, and Big Data analysis. In their classical use, hypergraphs model data dependences, and their partitioning helps uncover structure that inspires intelligent data placement that reduces data movement between compute units when processing the data. In this context, partitioning is often closely interconnected with a scheduling problem: hypergraph partitioning serves as an intermediate step towards finding an efficient parallel schedule for a complex computational workload.

Within this project, successful candidates are interested in pushing the envelope on the state-of-the-art in optimal hypergraph partitioning and scheduling. While these problems are NP-complete, recent research has shown that finding optimal solutions may still be possible with modest computational resources for hypergraphs of non-trivial size. In our vision, optimal partitioning and scheduling of smaller problems have value as

1. a tool to evaluate state-of-the-art heuristics for partitioning and scheduling, and
2. a pre-processing step that finds optimal solutions for small-enough yet critical problems.

The successful candidates have the unique opportunity to work with hypergraphs that naturally arise from the many applications areas that Huawei, as a leading technology company, envelops. Additionally, we offer the opportunity not only to evaluate the quality of heuristics in terms of standard load balance and cost functions, but also to relate solutions to current and future hardware architectures and systems that we develop. Successful candidates may furthermore modify current state-of-the-art heuristics using insights obtained from optimal solutions, or propose completely novel heuristics.

Responsibilities:

• in collaboration with local researchers and experts, extend current techniques for optimal hypergraph partitioning and scheduling;
• evaluate contemporary models and algorithms for partitioning and scheduling, compare and analyse their properties, and identify tendencies across/within specific application domains;
• produce and present research papers at internationally leading conferences and events.

Requirements:

A PhD degree in Mathematics or Computer Science is required. We seek candidates with research interests in one or more of the following areas, which should additionally be demonstrated by a publication track record:

• graph algorithms, hypergraph algorithms, and/or (hyper)graph modeling,
• hypergraph partitioning, DAG scheduling, and applications thereof,
• algorithms for optimization: integer linear programming, branch-and-bound, etc.
• solid programming experience, preferably in C++.

Creativity and excellent communication ability in English are key. High potential candidates may be considered for an early-career position.

What we offer:

At the Zurich Research Center, the successful candidate becomes part of a multicultural team of leading European researchers with expertise spanning from microarchitectures to mathematics. We believe such breadth is crucial to succeed in our mission to drive new fundamental research and achieve new innovate breakthroughs in future computing systems. If this speaks to you, please be sure to apply!