PhD Studentship in Sustainable Communications Infrastructures and ICT Services
Ulster Supervisors: Prof Gerard Parr, Sally McClean, Dr. Adrian Moore
BT Advisor: Dr. Fabrice Saffre
Expected start date: January 2009
Overview:
The following PhD project has been created under the auspices of the
India-UK Advanced Technology Centre (IU-ATC) of Excellence in Next Generation
Networks Systems and Services
(www.iu-atc.com).
During the lifetime of the project there will be opportunities to spend
a period of time as part of a related internship at BT Adastral Park in Martlesham,
UK and/or to visit one or more partner research institutes in India.
The successful candidate should therefore be willing to travel and spend some
time overseas as part of the research project. An Internship will be
supported by BT whilst any visits to India will be supported by our associated
UKIERI-DST project for the IU-ATC Virtual Graduate Research School.
Arrangements for the internship / visits will be made by the supervisory
team of the PhD project.
Project Specification:
The ever increasing demand for high availability and resilience in high
capacity data centres is placing huge pressure on the capital and operational
budgets of ICT service providers. Of all the financial costs associated with
the operation of a data centre the energy charges are a significant proportion.
The drivers for efficient and sustainable power management / energy consumption
are now seen as equally important to Telco operators and service providers as
they strive to provide 'green' ICT.
This project will focus on understanding and optimising the delivery of ICT Services with respect to energy consumption. In particular it will consider applications and services that are typically hosted in remote Data Centres and the tradeoffs between energy consumption in running the IT infrastructure that provides the IT services themselves versus their required "delivery" via networks. The research will develop models that incorporate energy cost and prediction (financial and carbon emissions), and the fact that these will fluctuate over time and geography, and management techniques that will allow dynamic optimisation across both (virtualized) servers and network elements to determine where/when services should run so as to reduce energy consumption.
The research will allow for the likely advent of self-reporting ICT (i.e. ICT elements that report their energy consumption) and consider how the applications and services place demands on the delivery networks and how they interact with network energy optimisation techniques. BT already runs a global "sustainability practice" that carries out Carbon Impact Assessments (CIA) and ICT Audits - there will be opportunities to drive the research against this context to help develop the next generation of ICT service optimisation techniques for energy and carbon footprint reduction for BT and its customers.
Eligibility:
Applicants should hold ordinary UK residence to be eligible for both fees
and maintenance. Non UK residents who hold ordinary EU residence may also
apply but if successful will receive fees only. All applicants should
hold a first or upper second class honours degree in Computer Science,
Electrical Engineering or a cognate area. It is desirable that candidates
will have an MSc in a related subject and have a good understanding of
statistical modelling and networking (some knowledge of economics would
be desirable).
Successful candidates will enrol on a full-time programme of research studies leading to the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. The studentship will comprise fees and an annual stipend of £19,600 (stipends are normally tax exempt). It will be awarded for a period of up to three years subject to satisfactory progress and is tenable in the School of Computing and Information Engineering at the Coleraine Campus, Northern Ireland, UK.
The closing date for receipt of completed applications is 5th December 2008.
For further information please contact Professor Gerard Parr, Chair in Telecommunications Engineering, University of Ulster - gp.parr@ulster.ac.uk.
Application materials are available from:
Research Office,
University of Ulster,
Cromore Road,
Coleraine,
BT52 1SA,
Tel: 028 7032 4729,
e-mail; hj.campbell@ulster.ac.uk,
Web:
http://research.ulster.ac.uk/info/prospective/apply.html
