In the following, you can find potential summer student projects of the PSI Center for Scientific Computing, Theory and Data.
DevOps engineer for the PSI Data Catalog
Are you passionate about reliability, automation, and scalable infrastructure? Do you want to build and maintain systems that enable hundreds of scientists to publish their discoveries efficiently and securely?
Your tasks:
We are looking for a Summer Student to join our team https://www.psi.ch/en/awi/data-curation-group and help strengthen the infrastructure and deployment pipelines behind the PSI Data Catalog and Electronic Lab Notebook — the central platforms for accessing, browsing, and managing scientific data produced at large-scale facilities such as the Swiss Light Source and Swiss Free Electron Laser.
- Your work will directly support researchers at PSI and across Switzerland by ensuring that scientific data services are robust, scalable, and easy to maintain.
- Enhancing CI/CD pipelines and automating deployment workflows for the Data Catalog
- Improving monitoring, logging, and alerting to ensure high reliability and observability
- Optimizing infrastructure using containerization and orchestration technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes)
- Collaborating with and contributing to the open-source SciCat community — helping ensure best practices in DevOps and infrastructure are shared across facilities worldwide
Your profile
- You are in the last year of your Bachelor’s studies or in your Master’s studies in computer science, a natural science, or engineering
- You have a good working knowledge of English
- You have experience or a strong interest in DevOps practices — such as automation, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, or containerization
- Familiarity with tools like Docker, Kubernetes, GitLab CI, or cloud platforms is an advantage, but not required
- You enjoy solving operational challenges and improving the reliability and scalability of software systems
We offer
- Hands-on experience building production web applications used in scientific environments
- Opportunities to improve reliability, scalability, and automation for real-world data services used by active scientific communities
- Mentorship and collaboration with experienced DevOps engineers and software developers
- Competitive compensation for the duration of typically 2–3 months
Project description – Mentor: Dr. Carlo Minotti
The PSI Data Catalog (https://discovery.psi.ch) is a central platform for archiving and publishing scientific data produced across PSI. Built on the open-source SciCat software (https://scicatproject.org), the catalog supports a diverse set of users — including beamline scientists, instrument operators, data managers, and external visiting researchers — each with their own workflows and requirements.
The SciLog Electronic Lab Notebook (https://scilog.psi.ch) is also hosted on this infrastructure. Researchers use SciLog to record, organize, and share experimental data, providing a digital workflow for lab notebooks and ensuring reproducibility of experiments.
This project focuses on strengthening and modernizing the DevOps foundation of the PSI Data Catalog and SciLog ELN, ensuring that both platforms are reliable, scalable, and aligned with best practices. Potential areas of work include enhancing and automating CI/CD pipelines, improving the modularity and reusability of infrastructure-as-code, refining monitoring, logging, and alerting systems, and aligning services with cloud-native DevOps practices. You will collaborate with teams to gather feedback, prioritize operational improvements, and implement changes that make the platforms easier to maintain, more resilient, and better equipped to support scientists’ workflows.
Spend your summer building real infrastructure for real scientists. Develop your DevOps skills, contribute to one of Switzerland’s leading research facilities, and enjoy a unique campus surrounded by nature along the banks of the Aare. Apply today!
Improving resources monitoring and usage on the Ra Data Analysis Cluster
Are you interested in scientific computing and web-app development? Do you want to get hands-on with the high-speed fabric that connects modern AI and HPC clusters?
Your tasks:
We are looking for a Summer Student to join our team (https://www.psi.ch/en/awi) and explore the usage of the JobStats (https://princetonuniversity.github.io/jobstats) monitoring platform. JobStats has been designed to both monitor and enable actions on the Slurm HPC job scheduler, which is currently used on the Data Analysis clusterss of the Swiss Light Source and Swiss Free Electron laser. Besides providing in-depth metrics of the resources usage, JobStats provides valuable tools such us Defense Shield, which allows the administrators to reduce the waste of resources – for example, GPUs.
You will be evaluating JobStats on a test analysis cluster, prototyping its deployment and integration with our systems, including testing and validation of both the metrics and tools provided by JobStats. The target for this project is to have a valid PoC to be then integrated into the Science IT production systems and used by domain experts for operations and problem solving.
Your profile
- You are in your last year of Bachelor’s studies or in your Master's studies in computer science, a natural science or engineering
- You have a good working knowledge of English
- You have good Python skills (Go is also an option), experience with Prometheus, Grafana or similar stacks is an advantage
- You are interested in getting hands- on in Platform Engineering and System Administration tasks
We offer
• Hands-on experience on Enterprise-level hardware and software
• An opportunity to contribute to real-world projects
• Mentorship and collaboration with experienced developers
• Competitive compensation for the duration of typically 2-3 months
Project description – Mentor: Dr. Alvise Dorigo and Dr. Leonardo Sala
As the Ra cluster is getting a more central role in large scale facilities usage, improve resources usage optimization is getting more and more important. We would like to create a proof of concept testing a new way of monitoring and acting on compute resources, based on the JobStats project. This would allow us to gather further insights into cluster usage, and enable us to perform automatic actions in case of resources mis-usage
Infiniband monitoring and topology
Are you interested in scientific computing and web-app development? Do you want to get hands-on with the high-speed fabric that connects modern AI and HPC clusters?
Your tasks:
We are looking for a Summer Student to join our team https://www.psi.ch/en/awi prototype a monitoring system for the Infiniband network in use at the Data Acquisition and Analysis systems of the Swiss Light Source and Swiss Free Electron laser. Your work will be integrated into the Science IT production systems and used by domain experts for operations and problem solving. The project is split in two parts:
- Code a graphical representation of the live Infiniband network status, based on log files output and information from the switches and the systems
Augment the graphical tool with live monitoring information, as current bandwidth, error counters, and alarms – eventually integrating with our Grafana dashboards
Your profile
- You are in your last year of Bachelor’s studies or in your Master's studies in computer science, a natural science or engineering
- You have a good working knowledge of English and good Python skills (Go is also an option)
- You have some experience with JavaScript and related libraries (node.js, react, ...)
- You have a good intuition how to dig for data and graph it
We offer
• Hands-on coding experience in a scientific environment
• An opportunity to contribute to real-world projects
• Mentorship and collaboration with experienced developers
• Competitive compensation for the duration of typically 2-3 months
Project description – Mentor: Dr. Ivano Talamo
In Science IT clusters we extensively use Infiniband as high-speed networking fabric. Infiniband is a well-established technology, used also in some of the majors HPC and AI clusters around the world. Despite its features, it is missing a comprehensive and flexible monitoring tool capable of representing the network topology, the speed of the various links, and the network load on them. Few open source projects have been developed over the years (https://github.com/jabl/ibtopotool, https://github.com/infiniband-radar/infiniband-radar-web), but many of them are either lacking in features, or are not maintained anymore. The project would require to understand which metrics to collect and their data sources, provide ideas for a service architecture, and develop the services and frontends to represent the required information on the fabric.
UI/UX developer for the PSI Data Catalog
Are you interested in web development and user-centric design? Do you want to build tools used by hundreds of scientists for publishing their discoveries?
Your tasks:
We are looking for a Summer Student to join our team https://www.psi.ch/en/awi/data-curation-group and help develop the user interface of the PSI Data Catalog — the central platform for accessing, browsing, and managing scientific data produced at large-scale facilities such as the Swiss Light Source and Swiss Free Electron Laser.
Your work will directly support researchers at PSI and across Switzerland by making scientific data easier to find, navigate, and understand. Your tasks will include:
- Contributing features and improvements to the web application of our Data Catalog
- Proposing and implementing UI/UX enhancements, with a focus on clearer user flows, improved guidance, and more intuitive interactions
- Collaborating with and contributing to the open-source SciCat community, helping shape a tool used by facilities worldwide
Your profile
- You are in the last year of your Bachelor’s studies or in your Master’s studies in computer science, a natural science, or engineering
- You have a good working knowledge of English
- You have experience or strong interest in web development (TypeScript, HTML, CSS)
- Familiarity with Angular or Single-Page Applications is an advantage, but not required
- You enjoy improving user interfaces and thinking about how users interact with software
We offer
- Hands-on experience building production web applications used in scientific environments
- Opportunities to improve real-world UI/UX for active scientific user communities
- Mentorship and collaboration with experienced developers
- Competitive compensation for the duration of typically 2–3 months
Project description – Mentor: Dr. Spencer Bliven
The PSI Data Catalog (https://discovery.psi.ch) is a central platform for archiving and publishing scientific data produced across PSI. Built on the open-source SciCat software (https://scicatproject.org), the catalog supports a diverse set of users — including beamline scientists, instrument operators, data managers, and external visiting researchers — each with their own workflows and requirements.
This project focuses on enhancing the user experience of the catalog interface and contributing improvements to the broader SciCat open-source community. Refining the user experience has been identified as a major priority for SciCat, meaning your contributions will have a visible impact not only at PSI but across multiple large-scale facilities. Potential areas of work include refining search and filtering interactions, improving integration with the help pages, and providing clearer inline guidance for users through tooltips, placeholders, and contextual hints. You will gather feedback from representative user groups, explore UI/UX improvements based on their needs, and implement changes that make the catalog more intuitive and supportive of both general navigation and specialized scientific use cases.
Spend your summer building real software for real scientists. Grow your web development skills, contribute to one of Switzerland’s top research facilities, and enjoy a unique campus surrounded by nature along the banks of the Aare. Apply today!