Post-Doctoral Research Visit F/M CONFVERT: Green Software Configurations

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Contract type : Fixed-term contract

Level of qualifications required : PhD or equivalent

Fonction : Post-Doctoral Research Visit

About the research centre or Inria department

The Inria Centre at Rennes University is one of Inria's eight centres and has more than thirty research teams. The Inria Centre is a major and recognized player in the field of digital sciences. It is at the heart of a rich R&D and innovation ecosystem: highly innovative PMEs, large industrial groups, competitiveness clusters, research and higher education players, laboratories of excellence, technological research institute, etc.

Context

The postdoc will join DiverSE (IRISA/Inria & University of Rennes) in Rennes, supervised by Prof. Mathieu Acher and Quentin Perez – a recognized software‑engineering team with strong expertise in variability, configurable systems, energy‑aware evaluation, and open science, offering an ideal setting for impactful research and community transfer. The postdoctoral candidate must have spent at least 18 months abroad (outside France) between May 1, 2021, and the project start.

CONVERT is supported by Britany region.

Assignment

Modern software is highly configurable; interactions between options and their execution environments (hardware, OS, versions, inputs, build/test pipelines) strongly affect both energy use and performance. CONFVERT targets “green” configurations-settings that minimize energy while preserving acceptable performance—by explicitly modeling and learning from this deep variability, with open data, open tools, and reproducible methods on widely used open‑source stacks.

References

Hugo Martin, Mathieu Acher, Juliana Alves Pereira, Luc Lesoil, Jean-Marc Jézéquel, Djamel Eddine Khelladi: Transfer Learning Across Variants and Versions: The Case of Linux Kernel Size. IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 48(11): 4274-4290 (2022)

Luc Lesoil, Mathieu Acher, Arnaud Blouin, Jean-Marc Jézéquel: Deep Software Variability: Towards Handling Cross-Layer Configuration. VaMoS 2021: 10:1-10:8

Weber, M., Kaltenecker, C., Sattler, F., Apel, S., Siegmund, N.: Twins or false friends? a study on energy consumption and performance of configurable software. In: 2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), pp. 2098–2110 (2023)

Pereira, J.A., Acher, M., Martin, H., Jézéquel, J.-M., Botterweck, G., Ventresque, A.: Learning software configuration spaces: A systematic literature review. Journal of Systems and Software 182, 111044 (2021)

Édouard Guégain, Clément Quinton, Romain Rouvoy: On reducing the energy consumption of software product lines. SPLC (A) 2021: 89-99

Axel Halin, Alexandre Nuttinck, Mathieu Acher, Xavier Devroey, Gilles Perrouin, and Benoit Baudry. Test them all, is it worth it? Assessing configuration sampling on the JHipster Web development stack. Empirical Software Engineering (ESE), 24(2):674–717, July 2019. Empirical Software Engineering journal.

Santos, Eddie Antonio, et al. “How does Docker affect energy consumption? Evaluating workloads in and out of Docker containers.” Journal of Systems and Software 146 (2018)

 

Main activities

Tasks and Responsibilities 

Lead research to (i) model configuration–energy trade‑offs, (ii) design robust, generalizable predictive/optimization approaches, (iii) run reproducible empirical studies on representative systems, and (iv) translate results into actionable recommendations, datasets, and open‑source tooling for researchers and practitioners; (v) disseminate findings

Skills

  • A PhD in the field of software engineering or data science or artificial intelligence, with a recognized research record
  • Experience in software engineering and data analysis
  • Experience in performance or energy consumption (bonus)
  • Autonomy, and the ability to work in a distributed and international group.
  • Fluent in English

Benefits package

  • Subsidized meals
  • Partial reimbursement of public transport costs
  • Leave: 7 weeks of annual leave + 10 extra days off due to RTT (statutory reduction in working hours) + possibility of exceptional leave (sick children, moving home, etc.)
  • Possibility of teleworking (after 6 months of employment) and flexible organization of working hours
  • Professional equipment available (videoconferencing, loan of computer equipment, etc.)
  • Social, cultural and sports events and activities
  • Access to vocational training

Remuneration

Monthly gross salary from 2 788 euros.