 | A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject.(January 2017) |
David Francis Bacon | |
|---|---|
| Born | 24 February 1963 |
| Citizenship | American |
| Alma mater | U.C. Berkeley |
| Awards | ACM Fellow |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | IBM Watson Research Center Harvard Computer Science Dept. |
| Thesis | Fast and Effective Optimization of Statically Typed Object-Oriented Languages (1997) |
| Doctoral advisor | Susan L. Graham |
David Bacon is an American computer programmer.
Bacon began working as a programmer at age 16 and worked for a startup during his senior year of high school. At Columbia College, Columbia University, he worked first with David E. Shaw on the NON-VON supercomputer, [1] and then on network algorithms and simulation with Yechiam Yemini, creating the NEST Network Simulator, [2] which served as the basis for a number of other network simulators including Cornell's REAL [3] and thence LBL's ns simulator.
Bacon spent a large portion of his career at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, starting as a programmer in 1985 working on the Hermes distributed programming language, [4] and eventually becoming a Principal Research Staff Member.
He took a sabbatical in 2009 as a visiting professor of computer science at Harvard. [5]
Much of his work at IBM focused on garbage collection. In 2009 he was inducted as an ACM Fellow "for contributions to real-time systems and to object-oriented language design and implementation". [6]
His work on the Metronome [7] hard real-time tracing garbage collector became the basis for the IBM WebSphere Real Time Java virtual machine, [8] which was used in the software for the Navy's DDG 1000 Destroyer. [9] The original research was subsequently selected for the 2013 Most Influential Paper Award of the Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages. [10]
His work on garbage collecting cyclic structures [11] in reference counted systems has been used in a number of scripting languages, including PHP. [12]
In 2013 he published the first garbage collector implemented completely in hardware,[ clarification needed ] [13] which was selected as an ACM Research Highlight. [14] [15]
In addition to garbage collection, his work has focused on the implementation of concurrent and object-oriented languages. His thesis work on Rapid Type Analysis (RTA) [16] [17] has been used in many compilers and analysis frameworks to construct call graphs for object-oriented languages, including Soot [18] and Go. [19] In 2004, his work on high-performance locking for Java [20] appeared on the list of the 50 most influential PLDI papers of all time. [21]
In 2014 he joined Google, where he is now a Principal Engineer, working on the Spanner distributed database system. He is responsible for Spanner's Database engine.
In computer science, garbage collection (GC) is a form of automatic memory management. The garbage collector attempts to reclaim memory that was allocated by the program, but is no longer referenced; such memory is called garbage. Garbage collection was invented by American computer scientist John McCarthy around 1959 to simplify manual memory management in Lisp.
In computer science, reference counting is a programming technique of storing the number of references, pointers, or handles to a resource, such as an object, a block of memory, disk space, and others.
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In computer science, region-based memory management is a type of memory management in which each allocated object is assigned to a region. A region, also called a zone, arena, area, or memory context, is a collection of allocated objects that can be efficiently reallocated or deallocated all at once. Memory allocators using region-based managements are often called area allocators, and when they work by only "bumping" a single pointer, as bump allocators.
Kathryn S. McKinley is an American computer scientist noted for her research on compilers, runtime systems, and computer architecture. She is also known for her leadership in broadening participation in computing. McKinley was co-chair of CRA-W from 2011 to 2014.
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