Elite U.S. supercomputing labs are looking for software engineers with backgrounds in high-performance computing, HPCWire reports.

In related news, on January 19–20, 2012, the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing (CAC) will present a National Science Foundation-sponsored training workshop on large-scale data computation and analysis. Agenda. Register.

In other related news,  Jeff Nichols, associate lab director in charge of scientific computing at Oak Ridge National Laboratory,
recently returned from a Beijng conference, says China is going to be “hard to compete with.”

“They’ve got a lot of money. They can invest tons of money in computers…. I think we have a better handle on applications and scalability and issues surrounding scalability, especially these unique heterogeneous nodes . . . But they can afford to build and buy these machines a lot faster than we are.”

In the next three to four years, China will graduate students with a lot of experience on these advanced machines and the U.S. could lose headway, he added.