PhD Position F/M Performance degradation as a leverage of sufficiency in large-scale digital systems

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.

Reducing the environmental impact of human activities and adapting to climate change are major issues. Digital technology offers opportunities to reduce the carbon footprint, but it is also a sector that generates numerous environmental impacts (manufacturing of digital components, energy consumption by networks and data centers, end-of-life waste, etc.) and is a source of both direct and indirect impacts.

The cloud offers users significant computing and storage capabilities. The maturity of virtualization technologies has enabled the emergence of complex virtualized infrastructures capable of rapidly deploying and reconfiguring virtual and elastic resources within increasingly distributed infrastructures. This resource management, which is transparent to users, creates the illusion of access to unlimited resources with no energy implications...

However, the energy consumption of these clouds is very real and cause for concern, as are their overall GreenHouse Gas (GHG) emissions and the consumption of critical raw materials used in their production.

As climate change becomes more visible and more dramatic with each passing year, with serious consequences for people and the planet, all sectors (transportation, construction, agriculture, industry, etc.) must contribute to the effort to reduce GHG emissions.

Despite their potential to optimize processes in other sectors (transportation, energy, agriculture), Cloud computing is no exception to this rule: the upward trend in its greenhouse gas emissions must be reversed, or else its potential benefits in other sectors will be negated. 


That is why the CARECloud project (Understanding, Improving, and Reducing the Environmental Impacts of Cloud Computing) aims to reduce the energy and environmental impacts of cloud infrastructure. The candidate will be hired as part of the CARECloud project, which is part of the PEPR Cloud program, funded by the ANR under the France 2030 program.

Understanding users behavior, acceptance and expectations concerning innovation in the Continuum and exploring performance degradation of services is a mandatory step to more deeply explore digital sufficiency. Our first results [1] in the context of the Cloud show that the number of applications and services hosted in the cloud is significant, and the associated number of infrastructure is steadily increasing. Cloud Service Providers need to respond to this growing demand and size their infrastructures accordingly but users misbehaviour and expectations in terms of service quality lead to oversized infrastructures. Infrastructures are sized to meet peak-demand, resulting in poor resource utilization and additional power consumption. But as their behaviour can increase energy consumption and environmental footprint, users can also help reducing them. We have studied how users provided with shutdown policy can reduce the power consumption of a virtualization
infrastructure in a cloud company.

Performance degradation could be one of the final hurdles to overcome in order to implement effective methods for reducing environmental impact across the digital continuum.
In this PhD, in co-advising by researchers from the Avalon team (LIP Laboratory, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon), we aim to propose solutions to reach these goals that are standards-compliant, easy to operate, and efficient in meeting the end-users needs. The PhD candidate will be located in the Avalon team (LIP Laboratory, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon).

The recruted PhD will explore several research challenges : 

- Define and explore performance degradation metrics;

- Study cloud use cases in collaboration with researchers in the humanities and social sciences;

- Explore acceptance criteria;

- Experimentally validate software solutions on the Slices-FR experimental platform.

- Containerization scenario in Continuum environment 


[1] Simon Lambert, Eddy Caron, Laurent Lefèvre, Rémi Grivel. S-ORCA : A social-based consolidation approach to reduce Cloud infrastructures energy consumption. 15th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science - Cloudcom 2024, Dec 2024, https://inria.hal.science/hal-04797304v1/

• 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

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.

1st, 2nd and 3rd year: 2300 euros gross salary /month