Steve Blackburn

Associate Professor

Department of Computer Science

Australian National University

Canberra, ACT, 0200, Australia

Phone: +61 2 6125 4821

Fax: +61 2 6125 0010

Steve.Blackburn@anu.edu.au

Research

My focus is on programming language implementation, and in particular the performance of modern programming languages on modern architectures. I am interested in understanding, measuring and addressing the narrowing memory bottleneck, and the characteristics of modern languages and architectures that exacerbate this problem.

Further details here.

Projects

The following infrastructure projects are key to my research work...

MMTk: a memory management toolkit written in Java (also see two MMTk-related papers below).
Jikes RVM: a Java virtual machine written in Java.
DaCapo Benchmarks: a benchmark suite for Java.

Publications

Wake up and smell the coffee: Evaluation methodology for the 21st century, Communications of the ACM 51(8), 2008.
Immix: A Mark-Region Garbage Collector with Space Efficiency, Fast Collection, and Mutator Performance, PLDI 2008.
The Moxie JVM Experience, Technical Report TR-CS-08-01.
Effective Prefetch for Mark-Sweep Garbage Collection, ISMM 2007.

here

Service

Editorial (conference committees, etc):

ACSC ('09)
ASPLOS ('04)
ISMM ('07, chair '08)
ISPASS ('09)
OOPSLA ('06, '07)
MSP (chair '04)
PACT ('06)
PLDI ('05, '09)
VEE ('08, '09)
WDDD ('08)

Other:

Jikes RVM Steering committee and core team
DaCapo Benchmark Suite Co-leader and maintainer

Misc

Patches to make SPEC jbb2000 and jbb2005 run fixed workloads:

pjbb2000.patch
pjbb2005.patch

Fun stuff...

Our son at ten months...	Our first daughter at about ten months...

The following photo was taken while hiking in Tibet with Anneke in May 2002...

Makalu (8481m, far left), Lhotse (8511m, second from right) and Everest (8848m, far right) as seen from Langma La (5330m) on the walk into the Kangshung (East) face of Everest. These are the 5th, 4th and highest mountains in the world respectively.

Some more photos.

Did you know that what you eat may be more important to the planet than what you drive? Check out my sister's book.