PhD Position

PhD Position
Performance Engineering for Service-Oriented Architectures

SAP Research:
SAP is the world's largest inter-enterprise software company and the
world's third-largest independent software provider overall. SAP
Research studies emerging IT trends and deploys new technologies in
reallife environments to determine their potential business value for
SAP. Research Centres are situated in several locations worldwide. Our
Belfast (UK) Research Centre currently has PhD positions available in
the area of performance engineering for service-oriented architectures
in collaboration with the Faculty of Engineering at the University of
Ulster.

PhD Program:
The PhD program at SAP Research offers you a great chance to get
industry experience in a real-life project, to work with top
researchers, and to have the opportunity to develop your own research
network. As SAP Research is a consortium member in various partly
government funded projects, it forms an ideal platform for working on
a doctoral thesis in conjunction with university partners.

As a PhD candidate you will be employed by SAP on a 3 year contract
during which time it is expected that you complete your submission of
a PhD thesis. Salary will be similar to university-based PhD
studentships and tuition fees will be paid by SAP. You will be based
primarily at the SAP Research Centre in Belfast, participating in a
SAP research project that is closely aligned to your PhD topic. You
will also participate in the standard activities of full-time PhD
students at the University of Ulster including attending supervisor
meetings, seminars and other training workshops.

Research Topic:
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a new paradigm for constructing
complex software systems and promises much greater flexibility for
composing tailored enterprise applications that satisfy specific
customer needs and business strategies. However, the non-functional
behaviour of such systems, such as performance, is not yet well
understood. Collaborative research is being carried out between SAP
Research in Belfast and the University of Ulster to derive more
comprehensive performance and resource models for Service Oriented
Architectures within SAP. Our vision is that these models will evolve
over time and enable better decision-support during any phase of a
software solution's lifecycle. The major research themes and potential
PhD topics in this context include:

* How to describe the performance and resource consumption
characteristics of services/components in a complex service-oriented
architecture.
* How to capture the performance and resource consumption
characteristics in an automated way and with minimal overhead on
development teams.
* How to derive benchmarking applications for SOA and describe
resource requirements in a hardware independent way.
* Identifies new methodologies and techniques for landscape
management within a virtualized adaptive IT infrastructure

Student Pre-requisites
Potential PhD students will be expected to have a First Class honours
degree, or equivalent, in Computer Science or a closely related
discipline with a broad appreciation of the research topics described
above. Candidates will also be expected to have very strong
capabilities in self-organisation and the ability to work in an
international team of researchers.

How to apply:
Please apply by sending your CV and transcripts (official examinations
results) to: research.belfast@ sap.com, refer to: job post PhD
Performance Engineerin