Profile: Michael Spear
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| 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 :) | |