David F. Bacon

Last updated
David Francis Bacon
Born (1963-02-24) 24 February 1963 (age 62)
CitizenshipAmerican
Alma mater U.C. Berkeley
Awards ACM Fellow
Scientific career
Fields Computer science
Institutions IBM Watson Research Center
Harvard Computer Science Dept.
Google
Thesis Fast and Effective Optimization of Statically Typed Object-Oriented Languages  (1997)
Doctoral advisor Susan L. Graham

David Bacon is an American computer programmer.

Career

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.

Contents

IBM Research

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]

Google

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.

References

  1. ↑ Shaw, David Elliot (1982). The NON-VON Supercomputer, Technical Report CUCS-029-82, Columbia University.
  2. ↑ Dupuy, Alexander; Schwartz, Jed; Yemini, Yechiam; Bacon, David (1990). "NEST: a network simulation and prototyping testbed". Communications of the ACM. 33 (10): 63–74. doi: 10.1145/84537.84549 . ISSN   0001-0782. S2CID   5311305.
  3. ↑ Keshav, S. REAL 5.0 Overview
  4. ↑ Strom, Robert E.; Bacon, David F.; Goldberg, Arthur P.; Lowry, Andy; Yellin, Daniel M.; Yemini, Shaula (1991). Hermes - A Language for Distributed Computing. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, USA: Prentice-Hall. ISBN   978-0-13-389537-7.
  5. ↑ Harvard EconCS Group
  6. ↑ ACM Fellows - David F. Bacon
  7. ↑ Bacon, David F.; Cheng, Perry; Rajan, V. T. (2003). "A real-time garbage collector with low overhead and consistent utilization". Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages - POPL '03. pp. 285–298. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.13.6486 . doi:10.1145/604131.604155. ISBN   978-1581136289. S2CID   52819687.
  8. ↑ IBM WebSphere Real Time
  9. ↑ IBM and Raytheon Deliver Technology Solution for DDG 1000 Next Generation Navy Destroyers
  10. ↑ Most Influential POPL Paper Award
  11. ↑ Bacon, David F.; Rajan, V. T. (2001). "Concurrent Cycle Collection in Reference Counted Systems". ECOOP 2001 — Object-Oriented Programming. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 2072. pp. 207–235. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.32.6283 . doi:10.1007/3-540-45337-7_12. ISBN   978-3-540-42206-8. ISSN   0302-9743.
  12. ↑ PHP Manual - Collecting Cycles
  13. ↑ Bacon, David F.; Cheng, Perry; Shukla, Sunil (2013). "And Then There Were None: A Stall-Free Real-Time Garbage Collector for Reconfigurable Hardware". Communications of the ACM. 56 (12): 101–109. doi:10.1145/2534706.2534726. ISSN   0001-0782. S2CID   52901561.
  14. ↑ Moss, Eliot (2013). "The cleanest garbage collection". Communications of the ACM. 56 (12): 100. doi:10.1145/2534706.2534725. ISSN   0001-0782. S2CID   9688334.
  15. ↑ ACM SIGPLAN Research Highlights
  16. ↑ Bacon, David F. (1997). Fast and Effective Optimization of Statically Typed Object-Oriented Languages (PDF) (Ph.D. thesis). University of California, Berkeley.
  17. ↑ Bacon, David F.; Sweeney, Peter F. (1996). "Fast static analysis of C++ virtual function calls". ACM SIGPLAN Notices. 31 (10): 324–341. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.69.2267 . doi:10.1145/236338.236371. ISSN   0362-1340.
  18. ↑ "The Soot framework for Java program analysis" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-06-16. Retrieved 2016-12-29.
  19. ↑ Go Documentation - package rta
  20. ↑ Bacon, David F.; Konuru, Ravi; Murthy, Chet; Serrano, Mauricio (1998). "Thin locks". ACM SIGPLAN Notices. 33 (5): 258–268. doi: 10.1145/277652.277734 . ISSN   0362-1340. S2CID   16929488.
  21. ↑ 20 Years of PLDI (1979–1999): A Selection, Kathryn S. McKinley, Editor
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