INRIA PhD Position in Towards Scalable and Dependable Computing in the Cloud

Location and Salary

A PhD studentship for 3 years is available. The monthly gross salary is 1 947.80 € during the two first years and 2 048.60 € during the last year. The successful candidate will join the SARDES Distributed Systems Research Group at INRIA Grenoble: www.inria.fr/grenoble

Research Description

Cloud Computing is a paradigm for enabling remote, on-demand access to a set of configurable computing resources. A Cloud may stand at different levels of the hardware and software stack where:
(i) an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud enables access to hardware resources such as servers and storage devices.

(ii) a Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud allows the access to software resources such as operating systems and software development environment, and

(iii) a Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud is an alternative to classical software applications running locally on personal computers which are, instead, provided remotely by the cloud (e.g. messaging services, document editing services, etc.). Although Cloud Computing provides a means to support remote, on-demand access to computing resources, its ad-hoc management poses significant challenges to the scalability, performance, dependability and economical costs of cloud services.

A differentiating element between Cloud Computing environments will be the quality-of service (QoS) and the service level agreement (SLA) provided by the cloud. However, service composition and cloud elasticity that underlie Cloud Computing make cloud management challenging. The proposed PhD project aims at investigating novel protocols for scalabile and efficient cloud provisioning, while guaranteeing dependability and reducing costs. The project will study an innovative approach that combines control theory techniques with distributed algorithms in order to build self-elastic clouds. Novel models, control laws, and distributed algorithms will be proposed for automated provisioning, configuration and deployment of cloud services to meet SLA requirements, while tackling scalability and dynamics issues.

Skills
Distributed computing systems, Distributed algorithms, Java programming

INRIA
SARDES Research Group
655, avenue de l`Europe, Montbonnot
38334 St Ismier Cedex, France

Contact
Application materials (including CV and the names of two referees) should be sent by email to
Dr Sara Bouchenak.
Sara.Bouchenak@inria.fr
Phone: +33 (0)4 7661 53 82
Fax: +33 (0)4 7661 52 52