[TYPES/announce] Post-doctoral Position at INRIA Grenoble

[Alain Girault]

           Proposal for a Post-doctoral Position at INRIA Grenoble
           =======================================================

Title
=====

     Advanced dataflow programming
     Model of computation and parallel schedule generation.


     Programmation flot de données avancée
     Modèle de calcul et génération d'ordonnancement paralleles


Location, supervisors, duration
================================

INRIA Grenoble (France),  Spades Team

   Pascal FRADET              Alain GIRAULT
   pascal.fradet at inria.fr     alain.girault at inria.fr

The postdoc position is for 1 year, starting end of 2014 (October ideally)

Salary: 2.620 euros gross monthly (about 2.135 euros net).

Abstract
========

We are interested in dataflow models of computation to program
applications for manycore chips. In order to ensure analysis and
scheduling, the synchronous dataflow model (SDF) is widely used
because it allows static analyses (liveness and buffer 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 I/O rate modifications, nor
dynamic topology modifications.  For this reason, many variants of SDF
have been proposed, among which we can cite BDF, CSDF, HDF, VRDF,
PSDF, and SPDF.

We have recently proposed BPDF [1], a dataflow model with integer and
boolean parameters able to express dynamicity while remaining
verifiable and schedulable. Integer parameters define rate
modifications while boolean parameters specify some dynamic topology
modifications (activation and deactivation of dataflow edges).

The postdoctoral project will focus on extending the expressivity of
BPDF and/or study multi-criteria scheduling of the model on multi-core
platforms.

- possible extensions of BPDF are more expressive changes of the
   topology (e.g., adding/removing actors and edges). Since the model
   of computation should remain analysable for liveness and
   boundedness, such linguistic extensions usually entails extensions
   of the corresponding analyses.

- parallel schedules of BPDF dataflow applications for manycore chips
   can be generated according several criteria: throughput (useful for
   streaming application), input-output latency (useful for real-time
   applications), power consumption (useful for autonomous
   applications), to cite a few. One of the difficulty here resides in
   multi-criteria scheduling with antagonistic criteria.

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.

Send CV + contact information of 2 or 3 recommenders to Pascal Fradet
and Alain Girault.

References
==========

[1] Vagelis Bebelis, Pascal Fradet, Alain Girault, Bruno Lavigueur:
     "BPDF: A Statically Analyzable Dataflow Model with Integer and
     Boolean Parameters"; In International Conference on Embedded
     Software, EMSOFT'13, September 2013.