High-performance computing on many-core environments and low-level optimizations are very important concepts in large scientific projects nowadays. Stream HPC is one of the market’s more prominent companies active in mostly North America and Europe.
As we often get asked how it is to work at the company, we’d like to give you a little peak into our kitchen.
What we find important
We’re a close-knitted group of motivated individuals, who get a kick out of performance optimizations and are experienced in programming GPUs. Every day we have discussions on performance. Finding out why certain hardware behaves in a certain manner when a specific computing load is applied. For instance why certain code is not as fast as theoretically promised, and then finding the bottlenecks by analyzing the device and finding solutions for removing those bottlenecks. As a team we make better code than we could ever do as individuals.
Quality is important for everybody on the team, which is a whole step further than “just getting the job done”. This has a simple reason: we cannot speed up code that is of low quality. This is also why we don’t use many tools that automatically do magic, as these often miss many significant improvements and don’t improve the code quality. We don’t expect AI to dully replace us soon, but once it’s possible we’ll probably be part of that project ourselves.
Computer science in general is evolving at a fast rate and therefore learning, is an important part of the job. Reading papers, finding new articles, discussing future hardware architectures and how they would affect performance, is very important. With every project, we have to gather as much data as possible using scientific publications, interesting blog posts and code repositories in order to be on the bleeding edge of technology for our project. Why use a hammer to speedup code, when you don’t know which hammer to use best?
Our team-culture
Personality of the team
We are all kind, focused on structured problem-solving, communicative about wins and struggles, focus on group-wins above personal gains, and all gamers. To have good discussions and have good disagreements, we seek people who are also open-minded.
And we share and appreciate humor!
ADHD and Asperger
As we have multiple people with ADHD and Asperger in the team, we help each other on more than just work-related obstacles. We think that a broad approach on differences makes us understand how to progress to the next professional level the quickest. This is inclusivity-in-action, we’re proud of.
Creating a safe place to speak up is critical for us. This helps us learn new skills and do things we never did before. And this approach helps well with all those who don’t have Asperger or ADHD at all, but need to progress without first fitting a certain norm.
Projects we do
Today we work on plenty of exciting projects and no year has been the same. Below is a page with projects we’re proud of.
Style of project handling
We use Gitlab and Mattermost to share code and have discussions. This makes it possible to keep good track of each project – searching for what somebody said or coded two years ago is quite easy. Using modern tools has changed the way we work a lot, thus we have questioned and optimized everything that was presented as “good practice”. Most notable are the management and documentation style.
Saying an engineer hates documentation and being managed because he/she is lazy is simply false. It’s because most management and documentation styles are far from optimal.
Pull-style management is where the tasks are written down by the team, based on the proposal. All these tasks are put into the task-list of the project, and then each team member picks the tasks that are a good fit. The last resort for the tasks that stay behind and have a deadline (being pushed) was only needed in a few cases.
All code (MR) is checked by one or two colleague, chosen by the one who wrote the code. More important are the discussions in advance, as the group can give more insight than any individual and one can get into the task well-prepared. The goal is not to get the job finished, but not having written the code where a future bug has been found.
All types of code can contain comments and Doxygen can create documentation automatically, so there is no need to copy functions into a Word-document. Log-style documentation was introduced, as git history and Doxygen don’t answer why a certain decision has been made. By writing down a logbook, a new member of the team can just read these remarks and fully understand why the architecture is how it is and what the limits are. We’ll discuss this in more detail later.
These type of solutions describe how we work and differ from a corporate environment: no-nonsense and effective.
Where do we fit in your career?
Each job should get you forward, when done at the right moment. Question is when Stream HPC is the right choice.
As you might have seen, we don’t require a certain education. This is because a career is a sum, and an academic study can be replaced by various types of experience. The optimum is often both a study and the right type of experience. This means that for us, a senior can be a student and a junior can have been 20 years in the field.
So what is the “right type of experience”? Let’s talk about those who only have job-experience with CPUs. First, being hooked by performance, as primary interest, would be the first reason to get into HPC and GPGPU. Second, being good at C and C++ programming. Third, knowing algorithms and mathematics really well and can quickly apply them. Fourth, being a curious and quick learner, which shows by you having experimented with GPUs. This is also exactly what we test and check during the application procedure.
During your job you’ll learn anything around GPU-programming with a balance between theory and practice. Preparation is key in how we work, and this you will develop in many circumstances.
Those who left Stream HPC have gotten very senior roles, from team lead to CTO. With Stream HPC growing in size, the growth opportunities within the company are also increasing.
Make the decision for a new job
Would you like to work for a rapidly growing company of motivated GPU professionals in Europe? We seek motivated, curious, friendly people. If you liked what you read here, do check our open job positions.
