Research engineer on estimating environmental impacts of large-scale distributed platforms

The Inria research centre in Lyon is the 9th Inria research centre, formally created in January 2022.  It brings together approximately 410 people in 20 research teams and research support services.

Its staff are distributed in Villeurbanne, Lyon Gerland, and Saint-Etienne.

The Lyon centre is active in the fields of software, distributed and high-performance computing, embedded systems, quantum computing and privacy in the digital world, but also in digital health and computational biology.

The recruited research engineer will be involved in the ODISSEE (Online Data Intensive Solutions for Science in the Exabytes Era) european research project. Research sectors such as high-energy physics and astronomy offer critical insights that have the potential to revolutionise research and development, leading to breakthroughs in theoretical fields. However, these areas often require intensive research, expensive tools, and substantial long-term funding, without which their results may be limited. The EU-funded ODISSEE project will bring together the efforts of three pan-European ESFRI infrastructures in the physical and computer sciences, alongside several other key sectors, to enhance European excellence and leadership in astronomy, high-energy physics, and information technology (IT). The project will provide access to essential high-quality hardware, software, R&D programmes and state-of-the-art experimental facilities to support key scientific projects and researchers, particularly those focused on the search for dark matter. Targeting such dataflow driven applications opens the way to a new range of technologies and services, feeding SLICES-RI with a unique yet representative set of specifications to progress their operational & experimental capacities at an unprecedented scale, increasing the dissemination potential. More information; https://odissee-project.eu/

From the Grid5000 infrastructure to now SLICES-FR, Inria (Avalon team) has a long research track history on energy measurement and management (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4614-0508-5_3) of IT resources.  The goal is to bypass this energy only focus and consider environmental impacts in a broader sense (life cycle vision). 

We are looking for a talented engineer who will be involved in the design, the development and the deployment of services (agents) ale to estimate the environnemental impacts of ICT usage of large scale platforms. These services will be able to estimate environmental impacts (multi-metrics) of IT resources usage and to report these information to platform users. This experimental approach will be validated and deployed ont the SLICES-FR infrastructure.  The SLICES-FR (Scientific Large Scale Infrastructure for Computing/Communication Experimental Studies – France) Research Infrastructure is the French node of the SLICES-RI infrastructure at the European level. It makes it possible to experiment with any new software and/or hardware approach across the entire IoT/networks/edge/cloud continuum allowing a holistic vision across the entire data chain, from its capture to its processing, including its transport and storage. SLICES-FR offers configuration, programming and measurement services on a wide range of heterogeneous equipment via single accesses. These equipment and services cover the areas of network protocols, radio technologies, the Internet of Things, services and data collection, parallel and distributed computing, edge and cloud computing for reproducible and responsible research. More information on : https://slices-fr.eu/en/

Main activities will concern: 

- Explore methodology, metrics and allocation rules for realistic environmental results;
- Contribute to the creation of software framework to provide an environmental assessment service/agent for large scale distributed platforms; 
- Develop a carbon calculator and multi-metric tools to provide and report pertinent information to platform users;
- Participate in the co-design of new generations of wattmeters and their experimental deployment; 
- Create the necessary ecosystem (documentation, reproducibility artifacts) to facilitate the provision and deployment of this service across all ODISSEE project partners
- Contribute to scientific publications and dissemination of results;

Compétences     

• Skills in programming languages and scripting
• English speaking
• Autonomy and curiosity
• Open minded
• Team working
• Capacity to write English reports and papers
• Sense of organization, autonomy, rigor

• Subsidized meals
• Partial reimbursement of public transport costs
• Leave: 7 weeks of annual leave + 10 extra days off due to RTT (statutory reduction in working hours) + possibility of exceptional leave (sick children, moving home, etc.)
• Possibility of teleworking (90 days / year) and flexible organization of working hours
• Social, cultural and sports events and activities
• Access to vocational training
• Social security coverage

Base of 2692€ gross / month. Wage according to the profile.