Computer Sceince Colloquium with Prof. Kent

Prof. Kenneth Kent of the Canadian partner university UNB in Canada

His talk will start at 4:15 pm in the room C118.

Topic: Managing Garbage in a Java Virtual Machine

Abstract:

Application performance is heavily dominated by providing data to processors to keep them busy computing. Thus, a processor can only run as fast as the memory management system is capable of providing data. In traditional programming languages memory management is manual (ie. C programming uses malloc/free). This decision was to support "smart" programmers who knew best when to allocate/deallocate memory for the best performance. Newer computing languages/platforms (ie. Java) support automatic memory management. Memory is allocated when requested, and memory is deallocated when it is no longer needed. A key part of this scheme is when/how to deallocate memory that is no longer needed. In the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) this is known as garbage collection. In this talk I will discuss several garbage collection techniques in relation to the JVM.

Bio:

Dr. Kenneth Kent is a professor at the University of New Brunswick (Fredericton, Canada) in the Faculty of Computer Science. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Victoria (Victoria, Canada) in 2003, his M.Sc. from the same in 1999, and his B.Sc. from Memorial University (Newfoundland, Canada) in 1996. Currently, he is serving as the Director of the IBM Center for Advanced Studies (CAS) - Atlantic . Dr. Kent’'s research interests include hardware/software co-design, reconfigurable computing, embedded systems, and computer architecture. Dr. Kent has completed significant research on Java virtual machine technology including the use of distributed computing and dedicated hardware to accelerate Java execution. This research work is the basis of a recent collaboration with IBM Canada to examine ways in which to best exploit multicore computing to accelerate the Java virtual machine. Recently, Dr. Kent is also improving computer-aided design tools for FPGA architecture exploration. His work thus far has contributed to several industrial collaborations and over 80 publications in refereed journals and conference proceedings.