Fully-funded PhD scholarship in parallel programming and dependent-types

The school of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews has a fully-funded scholarship available working in the Programming Languages Research Group with Dr Christopher Brown. Applications must be received by 1 March 2025.

Background

Algorithmic skeletons provide a convenient and high-level approach to writing efficient parallel software by leveraging common patterns of parallel behaviours. A skeleton library presents the programmer with a library of high-level parallel interfaces, abstracting away the low-level complexities of manually handling concurrency primitives, e.g. locking, synchronisation and thread creation. Skeletons give an excellent compromise between ease of programming and the ability to generate highly efficient parallel software. A wide range of skeletons have been developed for several different languages, including Fastflow, TBB, PPL and OpenMP. However, despite the proliferation of skeleton libraries, there is little support for an increasingly popular class of programming languages equipped with dependent types.

Dependently-typed programming languages address the problem of program safety by ensuring that code conforms to its specification. This is achieved by permitting types to depend on values, thereby allowing programmers to express logical properties, and proof, as intrinsic parts of their programs. This conformance is checked at compile-time. This interest in dependent-types has resulted in a number of functional languages such as pi-forall, Agda, Idris and Coq. However, despite these developments in types, these dependently-typed languages still lack a parallel implementation, making development of safe parallel programs impossible.

This project will explore approaches to designing and implementing a dependently-typed parallel programming language. These approaches will consider the technical challenges, but also balancing those with the high-level usability that skeletons bring and the performance expectations of a performant system. As part of this exploration, use-cases will also need to be developed, and the scientific evaluation of the performance of the system will need to be carried out.

Topics of Interest

This project is largely exploratory in nature, and may take several different approaches and directions, including (but not limited to):

Extending an existing dependently-typed language, such as Idris, with new concurrency primitives.
Designing and implementing an efficient parallel runtime system as a backend to the language.
Building on top of these primitives to provide dependently-typed concurrency behaviours, such as synchronisation points, channel behaviours, etc.
To design and implement a set of dependently-typed algorithmic skeletons such as farms and pipelines.
To explore and identify new skeletons that arise from writing dependently-typed programs.
To use dependent-types to encode safety and soundness properties and reason about these properties in a formal way.

The Scholarship

We have one fully-funded scholarship available, starting in September 2025, which will be awarded to competitively to the best applicant. The scholarship covers all tuition fees (irrespective of country of origin) and comes with a stipend valued at £19,705 per annum. More details can be found here: https://blogs.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/csblog/2024/10/24/phd-studentships-available-for-2025-entry/

International applications are welcome. We especially encourage female applicants and underrepresented minorities to apply. The School of Computer Science was awarded the Athena SWAN Silver award for its sustained progression in advancing equality and representation, and we welcome applications from those suitably qualified from all genders, all races, ethnicities and nationalities, LGBT+, all or no religion, all social class backgrounds, and all family structures to apply for our postgraduate research programmes.

To Apply

Informal enquiries can be directed to Chris. Full instructions for formal applications can be found at https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/computer-science/prospective/pgr/how-to-apply/

The deadline for applications is 1 March 2025.

December Graduation Reception: Tuesday 3rd December

The School of Computer Science will host a graduation reception on Tuesday 3rd December in the Jack Cole building, between 12.00 and 14.00. Graduating students and their guests are invited to the School to celebrate with a glass of bubbly and a cream cake. Computer Science degrees will be conferred in a morning ceremony in the Younger Hall. Family and friends who can’t make it on the day can watch a live broadcast of graduation. Graduation receptions have been held in the school from 2010.

St Andrews Research Open-day in Computer Science

Register for St Andrews ROCS HERE for free.

St Andrews ROCS is an event for those of you who engage (or are planning to engage) with research in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews.

The main audiences are prospective postgraduate students, prospective or current industrial collaborators, and colleagues from other disciplines or Schools in Scotland and beyond.

The event will take place Friday October 26th 2018, between 10:00 AM and 4 PM.

There will be talks from all research groups, posters, demonstrations, guided tours, and much more.

You can learn about how to become a St Andrews PhD student or an active industrial collaborator.

The event will take place in the JACK COLE BUILDING, NORTH HAUGH, UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS, ST ANDREWS, KY16 9SX, SCOTLAND.

You can download the programme of activities.

If you have any questions, e-mail dopgr-cs@st-andrews.ac.uk.

Register for St Andrews ROCS HERE for free.

Event details

When: 26th October 2018 10:00 - 16:00
Where: School of Computer Science
Format: Conference, Symposium, Visiting Day

December Graduation Reception

Congratulations to the Masters Class of 2017, and MPhil student Yunjia Wang, who graduated last week. Each year, students are invited to a reception in Computer Science, to celebrate their achievement and reflect on their time in the School.

Our graduates move on to a wide variety of interesting and challenging employment and further study opportunities, and we wish them all well with their future careers.

Computer Science Student Representatives 2017

Congratulations to our student representatives for 2017/8, elected by their peers last month. Our Reps are integral to the proactive communication channel between staff and the students and also chair and run the Staff-Student Consultative Committee (SSCC) held each semester within the School.

The reps are pictured outside the Jack Cole Building, after this semester’s SSCC meeting and are (from left to right)

Lewis Mazzei (1st year, minutes)
Beatrice Olivera (1st year, minutes)
Jamie Bell (2nd year, careers)
Gergely Flamich (School President)
Arnold Haidu (MSc, library)
Stacey Izmaylova (3rd year, social)
Xu Zhu (PhD, Postgrad)
Keno Schwalb (4th year)
Paul McKay (Evening)

Image courtesy of Ula Rustamova

MPhil viva sucess: Yunjia Wang

Congratulations to Yunjia Wang, who successfully defended his thesis today. He is pictured with Internal examiner Dr Alice Toniolo and Supervisor Dr Ishbel Duncan.

Computer Science Blog