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Andy King wins ACM Student Research CompetitionI am delighted to announce that, following his success in the ACM SIGPLAN Student Research Competition, my PhD student Andy King has now won first place for his work on Removing GC Synchronisation in the graduate division of the grand finals of the ACM Research Competition. At the ACM Awards ceremony in San Diego on 7 June 2003, Andy was presented with a plaque and $500 as winner of the Graduate Division of the ACM SRC by Mark Lewin of Microsoft Research. Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard M. Adleman won the Turing Award for their work on public key cryptography. Andy King receives the award for first place in the 2003 ACM Student Research Competition from Mark Lewin of Microsoft Research and Ann Sobel, SRC Coordinator. Java programs running on large servers are typically multi-threaded - that is, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) must run several separate threads of control concurrently. For example, a chat server might need to service multiple conversations simultaneously. Most JVMs need to suspend all user program threads before they can recycle memory that is no longer in use (garbage collection). Andy's work on Removing GC Synchronisation has shown that halting all threads is expensive. His research shows how to use static program analysis techniques to segregate heap memory so that this synchronisation is unnecessary, even without knowledge of the complete program. This latter scenarion is typical of Java where programs are loaded dynamically and on demand (dynamic class loading).
In November 2002, Andy also won the ACM SIGPLAN SRC at OOPSLA 2002 in Seattle. He was awarded a commemorative plaque and $500 by Dan Fay of Microsoft Research, who sponsored the competition.
For your interest, Andy flew out on Saturday, received his award at the banquet that night and flew back the next day. No time for sitting on the beach in the sun - straight back to his thesis!
Richard Jones
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