Senior Research Associate â Adaptive Brokerage for the Cloud (A3215)

A Senior Research Associate post is available, linked to the EPSRC-funded “Adaptive Brokerage for the Cloud (ABC)” project.

Cloud computing has quickly become the de facto means of deploying large-scale systems in a robust and cost-effective manner. In the public cloud computing market, there is a large set of competing companies offering what appear on the surface to be very similar services. Application developers must manually decide where, when and how to deploy, manage and scale a cloud-based application. Subsequently, there is a need for automated tools to simplify and support such decision making process in an adaptive manner.

The ABC project, a collaboration between Lancaster University and the University of St Andrews, focuses on developing an adaptive cloud brokerage framework to act as an intermediary between end users and cloud service providers in order to enhance service delivery and value. Such brokerage will open up an entirely new multi-cloud marketplace, allowing applications to be simply deployed to the optimal provider and resource type, reducing complexity, vendor lock-in, and computational running costs.

You will be responsible for researching, and engineering a scalable, maintainable multi-cloud brokerage framework. This will involve research on topics including cloud infrastructure and container-based systems, benchmarking, machine learning and predictive modelling. This will also involve co-design and evaluation activities with our industrial partners Adobe and Satalia, and scientific partners CEH and St Andrews.

The post will be based in The Distributed Systems Group at Lancaster which has a long-established record of empirical and applied research on cutting-edge computer systems, spanning operating systems, middleware, cloud computing, green computing, and self-adaptive systems, among a range of other topics. It is one of the largest and most influential groups in this area in Europe, with a current research portfolio of over £7 million.

The School of Computing and Communications offers a highly inclusive and stimulating environment for career development, and you will be exposed to a range of further opportunities over the course of this post. We are committed to family-friendly and flexible working policies on an individual basis, as well as the Athena SWAN Charter, which recognises and celebrates good employment practice undertaken to address gender equality in higher education and research.

You will join us on an indefinite contract however, the role remains contingent on external funding which, at this time is due to come to an end on 31 December 2021.

This is a unique opportunity to work at the cutting edge of cloud-computing research and to engineer tools that will have immediate application with industrial partners. Come join us in Lancaster. For informal enquiries, you are encouraged to contact Dr Yehia Elkhatib (y.elkhatib@lancaster.ac.uk).

Closing Date: 08 Dec 2020
Category: Research