[US](EECS) RA positions in Virginia Tech

Virginia Tech Real-Time实验室招人信息 （ZZ mitbbs）

替实验室老板发信招人，明年秋季入学为主。老板的email是binoy@vt.edu.

Applications are invited from outstanding MS students in Electrical Engineer
ing and Computer Science for PhD positions in Virginia Tech/ECE Department's
Real-Time Systems Laboratory (http://www.real-time.ece.vt.edu/). Several Ph
D positions with full financial support is available on a multi-year, US Nat
ional Science Foundation sponsored project on developing abstractions, algor
ithms, and mechanisms for distributed synchronization using transactional me
mory (TM). Many research groups have recently come to the conclusion that lo
ck-based synchronization is not scalable, seriously error-prone, and non-com
posable, and that TM promises to alleviate many of these difficulties. Furth
ermore, TM is gaining significant traction as the performance and scalabilit
y of experimental TM systems on multicore architectures -- now ubiquitous --
have been found to be excellent---e.g., most chip vendors now provide TM im
plementations (in software or hardware) for their multicore systems.


Virginia Tech's NSF project aims to build upon these emerging results and de
velop distributed transactional memory as a mechanism for distributed synchr
onization. In addition to the previously mentioned problems, lock-based dist
ributed synchronization suffers from the problems of distributed cache coher
ence, node/network failures, and node joins/leaves, and the general difficul
ty of reasoning about, writing, and debugging distributed programs---RPC and
its derivative models are notoriously hard to get right, let alone synchron
izations within such models. Distributed TM promises to alleviate these. Vir
ginia Tech's preliminary results on this can be found in Relay: A Cache-Cohe
rence Protocol for Distributed Transactional Memory, OPODIS 2009; Location-A
ware Cache-Coherence Protocols for Distributed Transactional Contention Mana
gement in Metric-Space Networks, SRDS 2009. The project's goals are to devel
op abstractions, algorithms, and mechanisms for distributed TM and roll out
distributed TM infrastructure software---i.e., run-times, virtual machines,
and OSes.


Students with prior research experience in OSes, virtual machines, compilers
, networking, and distributed algorithms are sought. Prior publication recor
d is a strong plus. Interested students must apply to Virginia Tech's Gradua
te School (http://grads.vt.edu/), and are also strongly encouraged to contac
t Prof. Binoy Ravindran (binoy@vt.edu) with a CV.