COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE: 3 Ph.D. GRANTS --EUROPEAN UNION PROJECTS @ UNISI --- DEADLINE 28/11/2011

[Muhammad Israr Qadir]

We are pleased to announce the availability of a full-time position 3 
Ph.D. grants at the UNIVERSITY OF SIENA, ITALY in the scope of the 
European Projects TERAFLUX and ERA, on COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE topics.

These open positions represent a great opportunity to develop an expertise 
in parallel computing areas, embedded systems and multi-core 
architectures. The gradudation period is tipically 3 years and the program 
will start formally on 1/1/2012.

The application is very welcome to both ITALIANS and NON-ITALIANS 
candidates that hold a Master degree or equivalent or that will get it in 
2011.

Siena is a small medieval city (50k people) surrounded by the fantastic 
country-side of Tuscany, only 60km from the larger industrial area of 
Florence. The DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATION ENGINEERING AND SCIENCE, born in 
1996 and including now more than 70 Faculty members and 100 PhD students 
and Post-docs, is one of the most active Departments in Siena. Our 
University ranks among the TOP 500 Universities in the World and among the 
first 7 in Italy.

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DEADLINE: 28 September 2011.

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RESEARCH-LINE: COMPUTER ARCHITECURE with the following subtopics:
- Multi-core and Many-core architectures
- Simulation Technologies
- Virtualization
- FPGA technology
- GPU architectures

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CONTEXT: Our Research is in contact with other leading European 
Universities and Companies: http://teraflux.eu - TERAFLUX is a FET (Future 
Emerging Technologies) Integrated Project with a 7.5 MEuro cost, 
http://www.era-project.eu - ERA is another EU funded project with a 4 
MEuro cost. We are very open to industrial contacts worldwide. We are very 
glad to foster International cooperation for the sake of reaching 
excellence.

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SCIENTIFIC CHALLENGES: We are looking at future systems with 1 TERA 
(1012) devices in a single chip (or 3D-stacked multi-die "chip"). We aim 
to solve all these 3 challenges: programmability+architecture+reliability. 
While it is quite normal to target 1 or 2 of these 3 challenges in current 
research, we have the ambition to solve all the 3 challenge with a 
disruptive approach based on dataflow concepts. In particular, in Siena we 
are developing architectural concepts and tools to simulate this new 
architecture (largely based on the well established HP-Labs COTSon 
Full-System simulator http://cotson.sf.net ). Moreover, we are 
investigating systems that can DYNAMICALLY reconfigure themselves. We 
believe that these are among the most important challenges in Computer 
Architecture nowadays.

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The Ph.D. School of Information Engineering and Science of the University 
of Siena has been recently enlarged to encompass both Engineering and 
Computer Science. It is aiming at educating scholars in a number of fields 
of research in the Information Engineering and Science. It is part of the 
Santa Chiara High School (http://www.unisi.it/santachiara/) of the 
University of Siena.
 
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Scientific questions regarding this position may be sent by email to Prof. 
Roberto Giorgi (gio...@dii.unisi.it). 
For administrative questions: please contact Dr. Amarilda Dervishi ( 
derv...@dii.unisi.it ) or our Ph.D. Office ( dott...@unisi.it )

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HOW TO APPLY (please note the close application deadline 28/11/2011):
1) Agree with the advisor (prof. Roberto Giorgi) on a specific research 
project to be submitted
2) Follow the application guidelines:
- http://dottorati.unisi.it/bandi/bando_traduzione_41.pdf
- http://dottorati.unisi.it/domande

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More information about us:
- We are part of the HiPEAC Network of Excellence (www.hipeac.net) and 
coordinating the TERAFLUX project (www.teraflux.eu)
- Department of Information Engineering (www.dii.unisi.it)
- Our Faculty ranks the highest score in Italy for Industrial and 
Information Engineering (Independent Valuation from the Ministry of 
University and Research - CIVR 2006)
- In annual evaluation made from CENSIS, University of Siena ranks the 
first among small-medium size universities (see 
http://www.unisi.it/dl2/20090618121815264/r2-170609_noadv.pdf, in italian )
- Student Services (http://www.unisi.it/v0/pagina_en.htm?fld=2812)

Other information:
- About Siena: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siena - A description by Prof. 
Cetin K. Koc, UCSB: "To me, the best city in the best region of the 
world."


With best wishes,

Muhammad Israr Qadir