Call for research project
Research Project in Parallel and Distributed Systems
The research project is a core component of the Parallel and Distributed Systems track, offering students the opportunity to engage in real scientific inquiry within one of the research laboratories affiliated with Institut Polytechnique de Paris. Working under the supervision of a faculty researcher, students tackle an open-ended problem at the frontier of the field, developing both the technical depth and the research autonomy expected of future scientists and engineers.
Students are embedded in their host laboratory one to two days per week throughout the project period, allowing them to participate in the day-to-day life of a research team while balancing their coursework. Master 1 students carry out their project over the full academic year, from September through June, while Master 2 students complete their project in the first half of the year, from September through February.
Over the course of the project, students are expected to survey relevant literature, formulate a research question, design and implement experiments or theoretical contributions, and communicate their findings. The experience is intended to mirror, on an introductory scale, the workflow of a doctoral researcher: studying research papers, identifying an open problem, proposing a solution to this problem, and evaluating the contribution.
By the end of the project, students will have gained hands-on exposure to research practice within the broad scope of the track. Depending on the focus of their supervising laboratory, projects may touch on topics such as operating systems, runtime systems, cloud computing, high performance computing, parallel programming, distributed algorithms, and more.
Evaluation
Students are evaluated on a research report, and a presentation. The project defense is a 30 minutes presentation of the research work followed by 10-15 minutes of questions. The presentation has to explain the work context and problematics, and describe the contribution of the conducted research project.
The report is a expected to be a 5 to 8 pages research paper formatted as a research paper. The report should present the context of the work, its contribution, a positioning with respect to related works. Both M1 and M2 students are expected to send their research report to their supervisors.
Proposing a research project
If you would like to propose a research project for PDS students, please send an email to Gaël Thomas with a short description of the proposed project. PDS students are generally interested in projects related to Operating systems, distributed algorithms, performance analysis, system software for HPC, system software for Cloud
You can find previous years' projects here: 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020
