Research projects
As a postgraduate researcher in the Department of Computer Science, you’ll contribute to research that addresses urgent global challenges – from safeguarding digital communications and enabling responsible AI, to foundations and using big data for societal benefit.
Working in a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment, you’ll access advanced facilities and partner with industry leaders to shape the future of technology and its role in society.
We have some of our projects listed below, and you can get in touch directly with our academics if you're interested in any of our specific areas of expertise or browse research themes and find supervisors linked to each theme.
You can also explore the projects available through our Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs), which facilitate funded programmes on research areas such as graphene, robotics and AI.
Available projects
Job and Task Scheduling and Resource Allocation on Parallel/Distributed systems including Cloud, Edge, Fog Computing
Primary supervisor
Additional information
Contact admissions office
Other projects with the same supervisor
- Dynamic Resource Management for Intelligent Transportation System Applications
- Managing the data deluge for Big Data, Internet-of-Things and/or Industry 4.0 environments
- Scheduling, Resource Management and Decision Making for Cloud / Fog / Edge Computing
- Problems in large graphs representing social networks
- Finding a way through the Fog from the Edge to the Cloud
Funding
- Competition Funded Project (Students Worldwide)
This research project is one of a number of projects at this institution. It is in competition for funding with one or more of these projects. Usually the project which receives the best applicant will be awarded the funding. Applications for this project are welcome from suitably qualified candidates worldwide. Funding may only be available to a limited set of nationalities and you should read the full department and project details for further information.
Project description
Scheduling parallel jobs onto machines is one of the most important problems to meet any performance objectives in parallel and distributed systems. The objective may be to minimize execution time, but one may want to meet other objectives at the same time, such as good resource utilization, energy-efficiency, cost, etc. As the problem is NP-complete in general, there is lots of work on heuristics and sub-optimal solutions. The target environments could vary: they could be distributed environments, clouds, multicore systems, GPUs, and/or their combinations, etc. These different environments change the parameters that lead to good solutions. There is already significant expertise on various forms of DAG scheduling (particularly influenced by workflow scheduling) problems and I am happy to discuss and shape a project related to any type of resource allocation, optimization criterion, and platform (multicore, manycore, cloud, etc).
For past work please check relevant publications from http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~rizos/publications.html
Keywords: Parallelism, Scheduling, Workflow, DAG
Person specification
General
Applicants will be required to address the following.
- Why do you want to do a PhD?
- In terms of personality and temperament, why do you believe you're suitable for doing a PhD and describe any experience that demonstrates your capacity to conduct research?
- How did you become interested in the ideas you mentioned in your research proposal?
- Outline the objectives of your research and explain the importance of this research in the context of your current knowledge?
- From your degree transcript what was your best and worst unit and why?
- What was your favourite unit and why?
- What was the most difficult part of your final year project and how did you overcome it?
- Describe how you have helped another with their learning either informally or formally or any service or leadership roles you might have had including extracurricular activities.
- Describe any community activities that you have been part of; such as hackathons, societies related to academics, or other extracurricular community activities for which you have participated in.
- How do you see your future after the PhD?