[TYPES/announce] PhD grant in Grenoble (France) on advanced dataflow programming for embedded systems at INRIA and ST Microelectronics

[Alain Girault]

		     Proposal for a PhD position
		     ===========================

Title
=====

Advanced dataflow programming for embedded systems: analyses for
scheduling and power optimization.

Location
========

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

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

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

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

The PhD grant is for 36 months. The gross income (i.e., before tax) is
around 2.400 € per month (29.000 € per year) and includes health
insurance.

Please send your CV and recommendation letters to
alain.girault at inria.fr and pascal.fradet at inria.fr.

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.

With ST Microelectronics, we have been working on a variant of SDF
able to express dynamicity while remaining verifiable (for deadlock
and buffer boundedness) and schedulable.

The goal of the PhD is to study analyses for this new dataflow model
of computation. The purpose of these analyses is to generate
distributed schedules for P2012, optimizing the power consumption and
the execution time. Each computing core of P2012 is equipped with a
hardware mechanism for DVFS (dynamic voltage and frequency scaling).

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

A Master in computer science or computer engineering, with knowledge
in formal methods, embedded systems, and/or real-time programming. A
knowledge of dataflow programming, semantics, code generation, and/or
distributed 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 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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