A joint French-Romanian grant for PhD studies in the area of high performance computing

Topic: parallel QR factorization and its application to least squares problems

A grant for PhD student is available in the area of high performance scientific computing. The grant is funded by the Research and Teaching French Ministry in the context of a collaboration network between France and Romania and is allocated to the INRIA Futurs Research Laboratory, in Orsay / Paris and the Automatica Department of Politehnica University in Bucharest. The grant is for three years and supports three 6 months long research visits by the PhD student (one for each of the three years of the grant) to work at the INRIA institute. The remaining time, the PhD student is expected to conduct the research and possibly be involved in teaching at Automatica Department of Politehnica University in Bucharest. The monthly (tax free) income while in France is 940 Euros.

The PhD project is in the field of high performance scientific computing. It focuses on development and analysis of efficient techniques for performing in

parallel the QR factorization as used in solving least squares problems. Applications of least squares are of crucial importance in many fields, such as, for

example, signal processing, geodesy, statistics. The objective is to study techniques that allow an effective parallel implementation, while preserving as much

as possible the structure of the input matrix. The parallelization of the

computation is an important part of the project, since the target of the research

are the very large systems as driven by present day applications. Those can be only solved with help of the largest computers performing more than trillion flops per second. The different techniques will be implemented and tested in C and the MPI message passing interface library.

This project is part of a larger collaboration with the University of California at

Berkeley, USA. Funds for research visits and participation in international

conferences will also be available.

Applications are particularly encouraged from those with research interests, and/or

experience, in parallel computing, linear algebra, scientific computing, and

programming experience in C and MPI.

For more information, please contact:

dr. Laura Grigori, INRIA Laboratory, Futurs Orsay, Paris, France

phone: +33 172925950,

e-mail: Laura.Grigori@inria.fr

or

prof. Bogdan Dumitrescu, Politehnica University, Bucharest, Romania

e-mail: bogdan@schur.pub.ro

Applications should be submitted by email to Laura Grigori at the above address.

Closing date: October 30, 2006 or until position filled.

Please include a CV and two reference letters with the application.