[TYPES/announce] Postdoctoral and PhD positions at NTUA/ICCS

[Nikolaos S. Papaspyrou]

Applications are now invited for:

   - one postdoctoral position (total budget: 21K€/year), and
   - up to three Ph.D. positions (total budget: 17K€/year)

at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), School of
Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), in collaboration with the
Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS).

Preference will be given to filling the postdoctoral position.
The decision to fill all Ph.D. positions will depend on the
applicants' qualifications.

All positions will be funded by the three-year FP7-ICT-2011-7 project
"RELEASE: A High-level Paradigm for Reliable Large-scale Server
Software".  The successful applicants will join the research team of
the Software Engineering Laboratory, under the supervision of Assist.
Prof. Nikolaos Papaspyrou and Assoc. Prof. Konstantinos Sagonas.
The postdoc will not have any teaching duty.

The start date can be as early as October 2011.


Requirements:
-------------

Applicants should have an undergraduate degree and, in the case of the
postdoctoral position, a recent Ph.D. in Computer Science or a closely
related field.  They should have a strong background in programming
languages and operating systems, with emphasis on the following
fields: functional programming, compiler construction, virtual
machines, concurrency, parallelism, program analysis.  Knowledge of
Greek is a plus but not a prerequisite.  English is our working
language for research.


How to apply:
-------------

Prospective applicants are requested to send an email containing a
short letter of interest, a CV, and references for recommendations
to Assist. Prof. Nikolaos Papaspyrou <nickie at softlab.ntua.gr>.
Informal enquiries should be sent to the same address.
Applications will be considered until the positions are filled.

Moreover, the PhD positions are administered through the NTUA/ECE
Postgraduate Secretariat.  Candidates must also apply for the NTUA/ECE
Ph.D. programme.  The deadline for applications is September 23, 2011.
Details and application forms are available here:

http://www.ece.ntua.gr/index.php?option=com_content&id=530%3A-2011-2012


Project description:
--------------------

The exponential growth in the number of cores requires radically new
software development technologies. Many expect 100,000-core platforms
to become commonplace, and the best predictions are that core failures
on such an architecture will be common, perhaps one an hour. Hence we
require programming models that are not only highly scalable but also
reliable.  The project aim is to scale the radical
concurrency-oriented programming paradigm to build reliable
general-purpose software, such as server-based systems, on massively
parallel machines. The trend-setting language we will use is
Erlang/OTP which has concurrency and robustness designed in.

Currently Erlang/OTP has inherently scalable computation and
reliability models, but in practice scalability is constrained by
aspects of the language and virtual machine. Moreover existing
profiling & debugging tools don't scale.

The RELEASE consortium is uniquely qualified to tackle these
challenges and we propose to work at three levels:

- evolving the Erlang virtual machine so that it can work effectively
   on large scale multicore systems;
- evolving the language to Scalable Distributed (SD) Erlang, and
   adapting the OTP framework to provide both constructs like locality
   control, and reusable coordination patterns to allow SD Erlang to
   effectively describe computations on large platforms, while
   preserving performance portability;
- developing a scalable Erlang infrastructure to integrate multiple,
   heterogeneous clusters.

We will develop state of the art tools that allow programmers to
understand the behaviour of massively parallel SD Erlang programs. We
will demonstrate the effectiveness of the RELEASE approach using
demonstrators and two large case studies on a Blue Gene.

Erlang is a beacon language for distributed computing, influencing
both other languages and actor libraries and frameworks.  Hence we
expect the project to make a strong and enduring impact on computing
practice in the two decades.


-- 
Nikolaos S. Papaspyrou, Assistant Professor | Tel:  +30-210-7723393, fax: 2519
National Technical University of Athens     | Home: +30-210-7524801
School of Electrical & Computer Engineering |----------------------------------
Software Engineering Laboratory             | E-mail: nickie at softlab.ntua.gr
15780 Zografou, Athens, Greece              | URL: www.softlab.ntua.gr/~nickie/