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Open PhD Positions

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GRSI : Groupe de Recherche Systèmes Informatiques

NMV : Noyaux Multi-coeurs et Virtualisation

Anciens cours

The TRISKELL team at INRIA and University of Rennes 1, France, invites applications for an open PhD position. This position is funded by the ANR INFRA-JVM project.

Title:

Resource reservation in a pervasive middleware

Topic:

Pervasive computing is now a reality with the massive deployment of mobile appliances, particularly smart phones. Despite the increasing importance of pervasive applications, providing adequate support for them within a computing environment remains a challenge because pervasive applications vary greatly in their resource requirements (processors, memory bandwidth, and disks). For critical applications, such as surveillance systems, a known bounded amount of resources must be guaranteed for the application to run properly; for multimedia applications, the amount of required resources may change over time and dynamic adaptations and redeployment are often required.

Modern pervasive middleware is typically implemented using Java, for example with OSGi or Android, because of its safety, flexibility, and mature development environment. However, the Java virtual machine specification has not been revised since 1999, at the time when the idea of pervasive computing was first introduced. It was designed to execute only a single application at a time, and thus it does not provide resource accounting or per-application resource reservations. Current pervasive middlewares are thus unable to reserve resources for critical applications, which may cause these applications to crash or hang when insufficient resources are available, and are unable to provide resource accounting, making it impossible to balance the load on the devices and to optimize resource use.

To manage resources of a pervasive environment, the PhD student will study the possibility to provide resource management in the VMKit Java Virtual Machine without asking for a complete rewrite of existing legacy Java applications. First, the PhD student will have to add resource reservation and accounting inside the Java Virtual Machine, second, the PhD student will have to define a language that describes the resource constraints of the applications, and third, the PhD student will have to study how ensuring enough resources to applications, even in case of dynamic requirement, by balancing the load between the devices of the pervasive environment.

Working Environment:

The PhD candidate will work at INRIA in the TRISKELL team. INRIA is the French national institute for research in computer science. There are 8 INRIA research centres located throughout France, hosting more than 200 research teams. The TRISKELL team is located in Rennes. TRISKELL’s research is in the area of software engineering, focusing on model-driven engineering and software testing. The team is actively involved in multiple European, French and industrial projects and is composed of 7 faculty members, 20 PhD students and 4 engineers.

How to apply:

To apply, send an email to johann.bourcier@irisa.fr and gael.thomas@lip6.fr with: