[Jobs] JOB: (Sydney) PhD Scholarship, Full Time

[Linux Jobs]

PhD Scholarship, Full Time

  Gelato APAI PhD Scholarships Available! 
 
Who we are: 
  Gelato at UNSW is engaged in making Linux run faster on Itanium. 
  We're currently looking for PhD candidates to do research into virtual memory, virtualisation, reliability, availability and scalability in the Linux system software on Itanium. 
 
 We have been working with our industry partner, HP, for the last three years.  Notable achievements during that time have been: 
  * Enabling access to disk arrays larger than 2TB 
  * `Best Student Paper' award at Usenix '05 for our paper on the Itanium Architecture from a systems programmng perspective 
  * Release of `Linux-on-Linux', a virtual machine that allows user-mode-linux-like functionality on Itanium. 

 Our Current Plans: 
  We're currently looking for one or two PhD students to join our team.  Topics include: 
  * NUMA page placement, superpages, and page/task migration interactions.  All large machines are NUMA to a greater or lesser extent.  To get good performance on these machines, pages need to be placed near the processors that use them. Shared pages should be striped with small granularity (preferably per cache line) to  minimise average access latency.  But the use of larger pages (`superpages') to minimise TLB misses means that striping is suboptimal. 

Moreover, when there are idle processors, Linux moves tasks that are waiting on the run queues of busy processors.  This also interferes with the page placement algorithms. 

 * User-level device drivers and file systems.  Device drivers are usually run with kernel privilege, and in the same 
protection domain as the kernel.  We have developed an infrastructure that allows device drivers to run in user-space.  Meanwhile others in the open-source community 
have provided means for user-level filesystems.  This topic involves measuring and improving the performance and reliability of such a system, with the aim of eventually 
removing drivers from the kernel entirely. 
 
  The Scholarships: 
     The ARC will provide a tax-free scholarship of $25118 per annum for three years for a suitable candidate. 
 
To apply, you should have a class I or class II-division 1 honours degree in Computer Science or a related discipline; be an excellent C programmer; have strong operating systems background,evidenced by excellent performance in operating systems courses, 
and demonstrated work experience in Linux kernel internals, or patches accepted into the Linux kernel. 


Contact: Email peterc at gelato.unsw.edu.au
Applications close: 15th March 2006