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.
In computer science, an algorithm is called non-blocking if failure or suspension of any thread cannot cause failure or suspension of another thread; for some operations, these algorithms provide a useful alternative to traditional blocking implementations. A non-blocking algorithm is lock-free if there is guaranteed system-wide progress, and wait-free if there is also guaranteed per-thread progress. "Non-blocking" was used as a synonym for "lock-free" in the literature until the introduction of obstruction-freedom in 2003.
Thread Level Speculation (TLS), also known as Speculative Multi-threading, or Speculative Parallelization, is a technique to speculatively execute a section of computer code that is anticipated to be executed later in parallel with the normal execution on a separate independent thread. Such a speculative thread may need to make assumptions about the values of input variables. If these prove to be invalid, then the portions of the speculative thread that rely on these input variables will need to be discarded and squashed. If the assumptions are correct the program can complete in a shorter time provided the thread was able to be scheduled efficiently.
In computer science, a mark–compact algorithm is a type of garbage collection algorithm used to reclaim unreachable memory. Mark–compact algorithms can be regarded as a combination of the mark–sweep algorithm and Cheney's copying algorithm. First, reachable objects are marked, then a compacting step relocates the reachable (marked) objects towards the beginning of the heap area. Compacting garbage collection is used by modern JVMs, Microsoft's Common Language Runtime and by the Glasgow Haskell Compiler.
Gernot Heiser is a Scientia Professor and the John Lions Chair for operating systems at UNSW Sydney, where he leads the Trustworthy Systems group (TS).
Matthew Flatt is an American computer scientist and professor at the University of Utah School of Computing in Salt Lake City. He is also the leader of the core development team for the Racket programming language.
Michael John Fischer is an American computer scientist who works in the fields of distributed computing, parallel computing, cryptography, algorithms and data structures, and computational complexity.
Nir Shavit is an Israeli computer scientist. He is a professor in the Computer Science Department at Tel Aviv University and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
George Ciprian Necula is a Romanian computer scientist, engineer at Google, and former professor at the University of California, Berkeley who does research in the area of programming languages and software engineering, with a particular focus on software verification and formal methods. He is best known for his Ph.D. thesis work first describing proof-carrying code, a work that received the 2007 SIGPLAN Most Influential POPL Paper Award.
The International Symposium on Memory Management (ISMM) is an ACM SIGPLAN symposium on memory management. In French, it is known as Institut des Sciences de Maçon Multitasking. Before becoming a conference it was known as the International Workshop on Memory Management (IWMM).
Kai Li is a Chinese-American computer scientist and professor of Princeton University. He is noted for his work on Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) and co-founding the storage deduplication company Data Domain Inc. which was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2009.
Tova Milo is a full Professor of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University and the Dean of the Faculty of Exact Sciences. She served as the head of the Computer Science Department from 2011 to 2014. Milo is the head of the data management group in Tel Aviv University, and her research focuses on Web data management. She received her PhD from the Hebrew University in 1992 under the supervision of Catriel Beeri, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and INRIA, France, prior to joining Tel Aviv University.
Liuba Shrira is a professor of computer science at Brandeis University, whose research interests primarily involve distributed systems. Shrira is accredited with having coined the phrase "promise" when referring to the completion of an asynchronous operation and its resulting value for the JavaScript programming language
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.
Yuanyuan (YY) Zhou is a Chinese and American computer scientist and entrepreneur. She is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego, where she holds the Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Mobile Computing. Her research concerns software reliability, including the use of data mining to automatically detect software bugs and flexible system designs that can adapt to hardware platform variations. She is also the founder of three start-up companies, Emphora, Pattern Insight, and Whova.
ACM SIGOPS is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Operating Systems, an international community of students, faculty, researchers, and practitioners associated with research and development related to operating systems. The organization sponsors international conferences related to computer systems, operating systems, computer architectures, distributed computing, and virtual environments. In addition, the organization offers multiple awards recognizing outstanding participants in the field, including the Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award, in honor of Dennis Ritchie, co-creator of the C programming language and Unix operating system.
Richard Vuduc is a tenured professor of computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research lab, The HPC Garage, studies high-performance computing, scientific computing, parallel algorithms, modeling, and engineering. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). As of 2022, Vuduc serves as Vice President of the SIAM Activity Group on Supercomputing. He has co-authored over 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals and conferences.
Dawson R. Engler is an American computer scientist and an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University.
