Garbage Collection & Memory Management
Summer School

David Bacon

David Bacon is a Research Staff Member at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center. His algorithms are included in most compilers and run-time systems for modern object-oriented languages, and his work on Thin Locks was selected as one of the most influential contributions in the last 20 years of the Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) conference. His recent work focuses on real-time and concurrent garbage collection, embedded systems, programming language design, and computer architecture. He has an A.B. from Columbia University and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He holds 4 patents and has served on the program committees of POPL, OOPSLA, and ISMM. He is a member of the ACM and IEEE.

Emery Berger

Emery Berger is an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he has been since 2002 after receiving his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin. Berger invented Hoard, a widely-used scalable memory manager that dramatically improves the performance of multithreaded applications. He also developed the Heap Layers infrastructure for building high performance memory managers, including both Hoard and reaps, a hybrid region-heap allocator. His current research interests include runtime and operating system support for modern programming languages, with a particular focus on cooperation between virtual and user-level memory managers. He leads the PLASMA group at UMass and is a 2004 NSF CAREER Award recipient.

Hans Boehm

Hans Boehm is the primary author of a garbage collector library that is widely used, both directly by C and C++ applications, and as part of the runtime for a number of programming language implementations including, among many others, the gcc Java runtime (libgcj), the Bigloo scheme implementation and the Mono .NET framework implementation.

He has published several influential papers on conservative and concurrent garbage collection. He holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University, was on the faculty at the University of Washington and at Rice University before joining Xerox PARC, SGI, and finally HP Labs. He has chaired POPL and ISMM conferences, and is the Past Chair of ACM SIGPLAN.

His home page is at http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/

Dave Detlefs

Dave Detlefs is a Senior Staff Engineer, and Principal Investigator of the the Java Technology Research Group in Sun Labs. He obtained an S.B. degree from MIT, then worked briefly for TRW and as a staff programmer at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. Five years of effort yielded a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon in 1990. Then he joined the Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center, working on garbage collection and program verification until joining Sun in 1996. At Sun he has worked on various aspects of Java Virtual Machine implementation, including garbage collection, JIT compilation, and synchronization.

Rick Hudson

Rick envisions using runtime memory management mechanisms to improve cache and shared memory multiprocessor performance. He is focused on the synergy between software algorithms and the hardware's micro architecture, particularly as it relates to memory performance. Rick is a strong believer in the build and measure approach to computer science research.

Rick earned a B.A. from Hampshire College in 1976 and an M.S. from the University of Massachusetts in 1979. Rick then founded a short-lived company building networked operating systems for Intel's 8080. Between 1983-89 Rick lead the Control Data Corporation Common Lisp implementation effort. Between 1989-95 Rick was a researcher in the Object Oriented Systems Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts where he co-invented the Train Algorithm. Between 1996-97 Rick was a researcher in the Laboratory for Software Engineering Research at the University of Massachusetts. Rick joined Intel in 1998 to work on memory management issues. He is a member of the ACM.

Richard Jones

Richard Jones the organiser of the Summer Schoo; he is also Coordinator of the UK Memory Management Network. Richard is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Kent where he is Deputy Director of the Computing Laboratory. He is the author of Garbage Collection, Wiley 1996, was programme chair of the inaugural International Symposium on Memory Management in 1998, and co-chair of SPACE 2004. His recent work includes the Beltway garbage collector framework and the GCspy heap visualisation framework. 

Eliot Moss

Eliot Moss is an Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts. His research interests include programming language design and implementation, database and information retrieval systems, persistent object stores and persistent programming languages, memory management and garbage collection.

Ryan Sciampacone

Ryan Sciampacone has been involved with all facets of virtual machine development for both Smalltalk and Java since joining Object Technology International (now IBM) in 1997. Components he's worked with include the original Ahead of Time (AOT) compilation VM support story for IBM's J9 JVM, as well as the JNI and JVMPI implementations. Currently, Ryan leads the J9 Memory Management effort. He is principally responsible for the design and implementation of the new scaling memory management framework for J9, Modron.