Deadline: 28 September, 2012
Open to: UK/EU students with a good background in Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics or a related discipline
Scholarship: There are funding studentships to cover home/EU fees for a 1-year MSc by Research
Description
Applications are invited to participate in the ongoing distributed computing and e-science research programme over a range of different project opportunities in the frames of the Department of Engineering Computing – School of Engineering at the Cranfield University (Cranfield – Bedfordshire)
The Department of Engineering Computing is part of the School of Engineering at Cranfield University. It specialises in the application of mathematical and computational techniques to engineering problems.
The Distributed Computing & e-Science research group studies problems related to the use of cluster, grid, and cloud computing resources, with a focus on engineering and science applications. There is a strong emphasis on practical solutions and development of system infrastructure. Current projects include a user interface for submitting batch jobs to the cloud, a framework for monitoring the resource usage of scientific applications, a plug-in to the Xen virtual machine monitor to improve the performance of parallel distributed applications, and simulations of distributed hash-table algorithms.
Specific project opportunities available:
- Computational workflows for scientific or engineering applications
- Parallel, distributed agent-based trading simulations for economics
- Workflow management system plug in for automated configuration and
deployment of custom virtual machine images on commodity cloud platforms - System for decentralized version control, management, and publication of scientific or engineering workflows
- Cloud-enabled virtual appliance configuration and build system
- Artificial workloads for platform benchmarking
- Improve compiler implementation for simulation of MPI applications without source code modification
- Improve Simgrid simulated-MPI network model
- Simulation and improvement of distributed and peer-to-peer algorithms
Students are also encouraged to develop original project proposals that fit within the themes of the Distributed Computing & e-Science research group. Several positions are available and strong applicants will be considered at any time for ongoing recruitment.
Entry requirements
Applicants should have good background in Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics or a related discipline with a strong programming ability in a high level language (preferably C/ C++, Java or Matlab). Please note that the above positions are only open to UK/EU students. Candidates should hold at least a 2:1 honours degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Engineering or a related discipline. Applicants with industrial experience or those seeking part-time employer-sponsored study similarly welcomed.
Funding
There are funding studentships to cover home/EU fees for a 1-year MSc by Research are available for suitable qualifying applicants.
Application
Applicants can make initial informal enquiries with Dr Mark Stillwell (m.stillwell@cranfield.ac.uk) or post a completed university application form for submission with a CV and the names and addresses of two referees to the address above.