[TYPES/announce] Postdoc position in Grenoble (CRI / INRIA)

[Alain Girault]

           Proposal for a Post-doctoral Position
           =====================================

Title
=====

Analyses and scheduling for advanced dataflow programming

Location
========

Grenoble (France): CRI and INRIA Grenoble (Pop Art Team).

Supervisors
===========

INRIA Grenoble:             Pascal FRADET and Alain GIRAULT.
ST Microelectronics Ottawa: Ali-Erdem OZCAN and Pierre PAULIN.

Application
===========

Please send your CV and recommendation letters to
alain.girault at inria.fr and pascal.fradet at inria.fr. The postdoc funding
is for 12 months. The net income is around 2100 € per month and
includes health insurance coverage.

Abstract
========

In this project, we focus on dataflow models of computation to program
applications for a new embedded many-core platform designed by ST
Microelectronics, called P2012. The static dataflow model of
computation (SDF) is widely used because it allows analysis (deadlock
and boundedness) and scheduling. SDF has a clean semantics and leads
to efficient implementations but it cannot express many dynamic
features. In particular, it cannot express dynamic input/output rate
modifications, nor dynamic topology modifications.

For this reason, many variants of SDF have been proposed, among which
we can cite BDF, CSDF, HDF, and PSDF. Our objective for this project
is to propose a variant of SDF able to express dynamicity while
remaining verifiable (for deadlock and buffer boundedness) and
schedulable.

For rate modifications, PSDF offers a good trade off between
expressiveness and verifiability. For dynamic topology modifications,
HDF offers also a good trade off. Therefore, a combination of PSDF and
HDF looks like a promising candidate as a SDF variant for our
project. This point has been validated by ST Microelectronics.

The postdoc should participate with ST Microelectronics to the
definition of such a variant. The verification and analysis of that
variant should be studied. The two main properties to guarantee are
the absence of deadlocks and the boundedness of communication
buffers. Another important point will be the study of a distributed
scheduling of the SDF-variant programs, so that programs can be
efficiently executed on the many-cores platform. To this end, a
particular attention will be devoted to the minimization of the
communication costs, in accordance to the memory hierarchy of the
P2012 platform.

To summarize, the work will consist in three main tasks:

- the participation to the definition of the SDF variant (a mix of
   PSDF and HDF) with ST Ottawa;

- the verification and analysis of the chosen variant (deadlock
   detection and buffer size analysis);

- the scheduling (generation of a centralized version and a
   distributed version).

Required Skills
===============

A PhD in formal methods, embedded systems, and/or real-time
programming (e.g. analysis, semantics, verification, validation, code
generation, ...). A knowledge of dataflow programming and/or
scheduling would be a plus.

Context
=======

The context of this work is the ST Microelectronics Platform 2012
initiative (P2012). P2012 is a many-core platform that integrates
multiple clusters of processors and HW accelerators with a
hierarchical memory architecture and a NoC. The position is likely to
involve travels between Grenoble (Inria) and Ottawa (ST
Microelectronics).

The CRI is the recently created Integration Research Centre, a joint
laboratory between two universities (Grenoble-INP and UJF) and three
French research institutes (CEA, CNRS, and INRIA). Its purpose is to
build bridges between industry and research to cut down time-to-market
for innovative products, particularly smart miniaturized solutions.

The main goal of the POP ART team (http://pop-art.inrialpes.fr) is the
safe design of real-time embedded systems. We explore that area
according to several research directions: programming languages,
models of computation, static analysis, formal verification,
implementation, ... The research within POP ART concerns:

- design (component and interaction models for real-time systems,
   heterogeneity);

- programming (synchronous, domain specific and aspect-oriented
   languages);

- verification and correctness by construction (controller synthesis,
   compositionally, ...);

- code generation (scheduling, fault-tolerance, compilation, ...).


-- 
-------------
Alain GIRAULT                       http://pop-art.inrialpes.fr/~girault
INRIA senior researcher             tel: +(33|0) 476 61 53 51
Head of the POP ART project-team    fax: +(33|0) 476 61 52 52
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