[clug] PhD Scholarships in Linux coding!

[Bob Edwards]

A friend (Dr. Peter Chubb) asked me to post this announcement about
PhD scholarships in Linux work at Uni. of NSW in case anyone was
interested. Only a small number of people would qualify, but the
rest of you might be interested to know that these sorts of scholarships
are being offered for Linux development here in Australia.

Cheers,

Bob Edwards.

	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 allow
	  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.