[ecoop-info] PhD Position at Ascola (Nantes, France)

[Thomas Ledoux]

  Sorry for the multiple copies
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Project-Team Ascola (www.emn.fr/x-info/ascola)
Ecole des Mines de Nantes, INRIA, LINA
Nantes, France

We are seeking a PhD student to work on the project MyCloud. The 
position is to be filled up to November 1st, 2010 and is funded by a 
grant from the French national research agency (Agence Nationale de la 
Recherche, ANR).

Title : SLA-aware Energy Management in Cloud Computing
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Context
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Cloud Computing is a paradigm for enabling remote, on-demand access to a 
set of configurable computing resources provided as services. This model 
aims to provide hardware and software services to customers, while 
minimizing human efforts in terms of service installation, configuration 
and maintenance, for both cloud provider and cloud customer. However, in 
the context where multiple clouds providers propose similar services, it 
is not easy for a customer to compare them and choose the most 
appropriate one for his/her needs (e.g. service performance, 
availability, energy-efficiency or economical costs). We believe that a 
differentiating element between Cloud Computing environments is the 
quality of service (QoS), which can be used in formal contracts between 
the provider and customer, established by means of service level 
agreement (SLA).
The objective of the project MyCloud is to define and implement a novel 
cloud model integrating the SLA as a core concept. We plan to build 
SLA-aware dynamic elastic clouds based on automated provisioning, 
reconfiguration and deployment of cloud services to meet the SLA 
requirements.

Goal
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We propose to tackle this challenge with language-based and 
architecture-based approaches. We identified three complementary 
research directions to provide SLA-aware dynamic elastic clouds:
- The design of a SLA-aware model and architecture enabling systematic 
and transparent integration of SLA to the cloud in order to propose 
automated provisioning, configuration and deployment of cloud services 
to meet SLA requirements, while tackling scalability and dynamics issues;
- The design of a language and associated tools/infrastructure in charge 
of automatically capture variations in cloud usage and workload, to 
detect SLA violation and to trigger cloud reconfiguration;
- The design of a language and associated tools/infrastructure in charge 
of dynamic cloud reconfiguration such as service provisioning (SaaS 
level) or virtual machine migration (IaaS level).

The resulting contributions will be able to self-optimize the QoS of the 
Cloud, more specifically it should be able to ensure the most efficient 
energy consumption management.

Candidate Profile
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The PhD candidate must have:
- a MSc degree in computer science.
- Excellent skills in programming languages.
- Knowledge in the domains of software engineering, service-oriented 
architecture, autonomic computing.
- Good organizational and communication skills.

Application
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Each application must contain the following documents:
- a detailed CV
- a cover letter
- a list of relevant academic courses (with grades)
- a list of 1 or 2 reference letters with contact addresses

Starting date: November 1st, 2010

Applications should be sent electronically to Thomas Ledoux 
(Thomas.Ledoux at mines-nantes.fr)