[TYPES/announce] PhD opportunities in programming languages, testing and verification for heterogeneous many-core systems

[Alastair Donaldson]

Dear all

[Please spread the word to folks you believe may be interested.]

I'm looking to recruit up to two PhD students, to start in October 2017, 
to work on topics related to programmability of heterogeneous many-core 
systems.  These are systems on top of which software is accelerated 
across multiple cores, via accelerators such as GPUs and FPGAs, and 
where new technologies such as cloud-assistance are employed to improve 
performance and reliability.  Heterogeneous many-core systems have 
immense promise, but are very hard to program correctly and efficiently, 
and pose challenges for programmers, language designers and tool builders.

There's a great deal of scope for research in this area, and relevant 
topic for PhDs in my group include, but are not limited to:

- New programming models for heterogeneous many-core systems, including 
high level programming models from which to compile to lower-level 
representations, as well as advances in the semantics and capabilities 
of lower-level languages such as OpenCL, CUDA and HSA.

- Verification and testing techniques for many-core software, coping 
with the challenges posed by concurrency, weak memory and non-uniform 
semantics across diverse devices.

- Testing and certification of compilation for many-core platforms, 
including translation validation from high level languages to lower 
level representations, and fuzz testing of low-level compilers.

- Security threats posed by many-core unreliability, including exploits 
induced by software, compiler and driver defects, and security 
challenges associated with virtualisation of GPU devices in the cloud.

There is a rolling deadline for applications, but sooner is better in 
terms of funding opportunities.

Please see my group's web page - http://multicore.doc.ic.ac.uk/ - for 
the kind of things we do, and please contact me - 
alastair.donaldson at imperial.ac.uk - if you'd like to discuss these 
opportunities!

Best wishes

Ally