Picture of Michael Spear
homepage [http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/spear/]
area Systems
advisor Michael Scott
citizenship US
What are your research interests?
I'm interested in run-time systems that make it easy to write parallel programs. I maintain the RSTM package, a C++ software transactional memory system that makes it easy to write programs that share memory across threads correctly without using locks. I hope that over the next few years I can keep improving this system and making it more seamless/automatic so that it can be used in everyday applications.

Where are you from originally?
I'm originally from Orange County, New York, but I've also lived in Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Alaska, Washington, and Arkansas.

What do you do on a typical day?
Write code, read papers, and talk to the other students to get new ideas that advance my research and help them with theirs.

What are your goals for this year?
I'm working on a new transactional memory algorithm that will at least double performance. I hope to have it finished soon, and then I'll focus on the design of a new nonblocking memory management algorithm with Luke Dalessandro and Aaron Rolett.

What do you plan to do after you graduate?
I'm not sure yet. I really enjoy working with undergraduate students, but working in a corporate research lab is lots of fun, too.

How do you like to spend your free time?
I'm married and have an 8-month-old son. There's no better way to spend my free time than with my family :)

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