Ciência sem Fronteiras (Science Without Borders)
DCU PhD Project Template:
**Please use one form per project**
Please complete & submit to your Head of School by Monday 16th July
PI name & contact details:
Geoff Hamilton, hamilton@computing.dcu.ie
School:
Computing
Research Centre / group affiliation:
Lero, CloudCore
Research group / centre website:
www.lero.ie, www.computing.dcu.ie/research/cloudcomputing-research-centre-cloudcore
www.computing.dcu.ie/~hamilton
PI website / link to CV:
Brief summary of PI research / research group / centre activity (2 or 3 lines max):
The overall aim of the research within our group is to develop techniques to facilitate the
construction of software that is provably correct and efficient, and to apply these techniques to real
problems.
Title & brief description of PhD project (suitable for publication on web):
Title: TraPEES: Transforming Programs for Energy Efficient Software
Description:
The ever increasing energy consumption of computing systems has started to limit further
performance growth due to overwhelming costs and environmental concerns. Energy consumption
has therefore become a more important optimisation criterion in many computing systems than
performance. While many improvements in energy efficiency have been made at the hardware and
systems levels, not so many have been made at the software level. In this research project we
propose to work at the software level by optimising the energy efficiency of programs using novel
transformation techniques. These transformation techniques will focus on those parts of programs
which consume the most energy, so programs will first need to be profiled to determine this
information. Landauer’s principle relates the energy consumption of software to the erasure of
information. We therefore propose to measure the amount of information erasure performed by
programs using profiling techniques to give an estimate of energy consumption, and to reduce the
amount of this information erasure as much as possible by extending our previously developed
program transformation algorithm called distillation.
Unique selling points of PhD project in DCU:
DCU projects should offer something that’s not available in Brazil – specific equipment, multi-disciplinarity,
aspects of structured programme, links with industry, placements, links with other research groups etc.
This project will be conducted in conjunction with Lero (the Irish software engineering research centre) and
the CloudCore research group in the School of Computing. Both of these groups provide a stimulating
environment for performing collaborative research, with access to many other researchers working in similar
areas and also contacts with relevant industrial partners. They also offer research support, and access to a
wide range of highly parallel architectures which are needed for this project and are not widely available. Lero
also offers unique research training through the Lero Graduate School on Software Engineering (LGSSE) with a
number of relevant taught courses in the first year.
Name & contact details for project queries, if different from PI named above:
Please indicate the graduates of which disciplines that should apply:
Computer Science
Mathematics
Ciência sem Fronteiras / Science Without Borders Priority Area:
Please indicate the specific programme priority area under which the proposed PhD project fits- choose only
one (tick box):
Engineering and other technological areas
Pure and Natural Sciences (e.g. mathematics, physics, chemistry)
Health and Biomedical Sciences

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)
Aerospace
Pharmaceuticals
Oil, Gas and Coal
Renewable Energy
Minerals
Biotechnology
Nanotechnology and New Materials
Technology of prevention and remediation of natural disasters
Biodiversity and Bioprospection
Marine Sciences
Creative Industry
New technologies in constructive engineering
Please complete