Monday, March 6, 2023

[DMANET] PhD position at ENS Lyon - Efficient and environment-friendly scheduling and resource management algorithms at the edge

Dear all,

A PhD position is available at the LIP laboratory, ENS Lyon, France (http://www.ens-lyon.fr/LIP), in the Roma team (http://www.ens-lyon.fr/LIP/ROMA), on efficient and environment-friendly scheduling and resource management algorithms at the edge. The candidate will have a 3-year fully funded PhD scholarship by CNRS, starting in Fall 2023. This PhD scholarship is within the framework of a CNRS-U.Chicago project with Andrew A. Chien (http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~aachien/), and will provide opportunities for collaborations with, and visits to, U. Chicago.

Motivation -- Cloud computing has been very successful in providing on-demand computing resources for various compute-intensive applications. However, cloud data-centers have increased in size to become large facilities with a huge environmental overhead and high carbon emissions. While the world is focusing on slowing climate change, computer scientists have been searching for solutions to reduce their impact by optimizing the energy consumption and carbon emissions of the applications.

We are looking for a PhD student to work for three years on a project aiming at optimizing the scheduling of large-scale distributed applications that require a lot of computing resources, with the aim to decrease power usage and carbon emissions. Two main directions are considered to achieve these objectives:

(1) Focus on the locality of computations. Rather than being executed in a large cloud environment, several applications could indeed benefit from a local processing, coordinated across several geographically neighboring devices, from sensors to phones and laptops. The idea is to execute some parts of the application directly on the edge server where they originate from, hence reducing the volume of data transfers and the corresponding energy consumption. The PhD candidate will define a formal model, analyze the problem complexity, and propose algorithmic solutions.

(2) Consider varying power supply. Since the amount and nature of the power supplied to each edge device evolves over time, it may add uncertainties to the execution times depending on the devices. The ambitious goal of the PhD is then to design clever scheduling algorithms that will dynamically account for all of these changes, when deciding on which device to execute each part of the application.

Collaborations -- The student will be mainly located at ENS Lyon, working under the supervision of Anne Benoit (http://bit.ly/abenoit) and Frédéric Vivien (http://perso.ens-lyon.fr/frederic.vivien/). Several long-stay trips at U. Chicago will be organized during the PhD in order to collaborate with Andrew A. Chien (http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~aachien/).

Prerequisites -- The position requires a Research Master's degree in Computer Science, a solid knowledge on algorithm design and complexity study, programming skills, and excellent writing, communication and presentation skills in English.

How to apply -- Interested applicants must send the following documents, in a single pdf file, to Anne.Benoit@ens-lyon.fr : (a) motivation letter; (b) detailed CV; (c) academic transcripts (bachelor/master); (d) one-page summary of the research work conducted so far, and list of publications (if any); (e) at least two recommendation letters. The application deadline is April 24.

Best regards,

Anne Benoit
Anne.Benoit@ens-lyon.fr
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