PhD student in Resilience and Robustness of Next Generation Intelligent Distributed Systems (Dr.Leo

In the coming digital era, thousands of devices will communicate with each other across the Internet and take decisions without their owner being even aware of it. Millions of small actions will be triggered around us by machine learning algorithms in our day to day life. While important decisions will always require a human explicit agreement, the less critical decisions can still play important roles in future systems (traffic controllers, health care, etc). Those decisions are taken based in the status of the system and the input data, both of which are subject to errors that can happen either by natural factors or induced by attackers. In both cases, the consequences of such corruptions could be catastrophic.

The robustness and security of next generation intelligent distributed systems is critical for the safety of the general population. It is mandatory to study the limitations and the behaviour of a compromised system, whether it is under a targeted attack or the result of an involuntary error. This involves the reliability analysis of all the components of the system: from the data gathered and transmitted from distributed sensors, to the cloud servers on which the data is being gathered and processed, passing through all the intermediary components such as mobile devices.
The goal of this research thesis is to study the robustness and reliability of next generation intelligent distributed systems.

The Computer Sciences Department of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CS) have as main objective the advancement of supercomputing technologies, both hardware and software, in order to attain exaflop performance in future machines. This can be achieved by reducing the gap between what hardware design offers and applications require. BSC-CS is composed of several groups (184 individuals). The research will be performed in collaboration of two groups: the Computer Architecture for Parallel Paradigms and the Workflows and Distributed Computing group.