Simon Wilkinson

Ph.D. Student

Room number: IT-302
email: simon.wilkinson @ cs.man.ac.uk
Tel.: +44 161 275 3531
Other: contact details

I am a PhD student within the Advanced Processor Technologies research group at the School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK. I work within the JAMAICA project, which is investigating the design of multi-core processors and their accompanying software environments. I have been with the group since October 2005, under the supervision of Prof. Ian Watson.

Current Research

To fulfil their performance potential, multi-core processors require workloads with high levels of thread-level parallelism (TLP). Explicit multi-threaded programming is widely considered to be difficult for general purpose applications; therefore my research focuses on the automatic extraction of TLP from otherwise sequential software via thread-level speculative execution (TLS). For a introduction to TLS, see [1] or the PACT99 paper by Oplinger et-al. My current research focuses on the application of TLS to object-oriented programs, specifically, how the predictability of object behaviour can be exploited to generate parallelism. I am also interested how virtual machine environments can act as a platform for TLS implementation. In the course of my research, I have implemented a complete software TLS system based on the Jikes Research Virtual Machine.

Research Interests

Programming Language Implementation.
I have a wide range of interests within programming language implementation, including concurrency, runtime compilation, garbage-collection, VM environments, meta-circular implementation, reflective architectures and meta-level architectures.

Parallel Computing Models.
Based on the work for my PhD, I also have specific interests in speculative thread-level parallelism, data-flow execution models and the exploitation of multi-core / many-core architectures.

Recent Publications

• Thread and Execution-Context Specific Barriers via Dynamic Method Versioning
  S. Wilkinson and I. Watson
  to appear in Proc. Workshop on Implementation, Compilation, Optimization of Object-Oriented Languages, Programs and Systems (ICOOOLPS), ECOOP 2009.
  [PDF]
• Speculative Multithreading: An Object-driven Approach
  S. Wilkinson and I. Watson
  in Proc. Workshop on Parallel Execution of Sequential Programs on Multicore Architectures (PESPMA), ISCA 2008.
  [PDF]

Internships and Collaborations

The Maxine Virtual Machine.
In 2008 I completed an internship for Sun Microsystems Laboratories working on the Maxine VM (a meta-circular research VM for Java). I continue to collaborate on the project and contribute to the open source release.