picture of Michael Spear

Michael Spear

URCS Graduate Student
spear@cs.rochester.edu
Research Interests

I am interested in runtime and operating systems, languages, and processor and memory architecture, with an emphasis on simplifying the development of correct multithreaded applications.

My current research is focused on software transactional memory (STM), particularly algorithms, hardware and compiler support, the design of STM-aware memory allocators, and contention management with worst-case guarantees. I am also investigating techniques to allow transactional and nontransactional code to use the same data structures concurrently.

If you're interested in transactional memory, please visit the Rochester High-Performance Synchronization site for more information and source code.

"Grad School After Life"

Most grad students wonder about "life after grad school." I had the opposite problem: 5 years after graduating from college, I came back to grad school, and I wondered what it would be like after having a real life.

If you are a prospective graduate student who has spent some time outside of academic computer science, you probably have some questions about the transition back to graduate school. My experience might be interesting to you. After graduating from West Point, I spent 5 years as a communications officer in the Air Force, with three of those years in combat plans and two of those years in aircraft maintenance (I never actually did communications work). I lived in Biloxi, Mississippi, Anchorage, Alaska, and Little Rock, Arkansas. I married shortly after college. In short, my resume looked nothing like my notion of "the typical grad student".

Now I'm in my 5th year of graduate studies, making good progress and enjoying every minute of my research. I've interned at Microsoft and IBM. I have two kids, I own a house, and I'm on track to defend my dissertation in 5 years.

There have been some sacrifices along the way, some adjustments, and a lot of growing. You may find that my experiences can help you to decide if pursuing a PhD at URCS is right for you. Don't hesitate to send me an email (especially if you have questions about transitioning from full-time military service to graduate studies). I'm not on the admissions committee, so nothing you say or ask will have any bearing on your application, but I might be able to help you figure out if "Grad School After Life" is right for you.

Publications

"Ordering-Based Semantics for Software Transactional Memory," by M. F. Spear, L. Dalessandro, V. J. Marathe, and M. L. Scott. 12th International Conference On Principles Of DIstributed Systems (OPODIS 2008), Dec. 2008. Earlier version available as TR 938, Computer Science Department, University of Rochester, Aug. 2008.

"Implementing and Exploiting Inevitability in Software Transactional Memory", by Michael Spear, Michael Silverman, Luke Dalessandro, Maged Michael, and Michael Scott. 37th International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP) , Sep. 2008.

"Scalable Techniques for Transparent Privatization in Software Transactional Memory", by Virendra Marathe, Michael Spear, and Michael Scott. 37th International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP) , Sep. 2008.

"Brief Announcement: Transactional Memory Retry Mechanisms", by Michael Spear, Andrew Sveikauskas, and Michael Scott. 27th ACM Symp. on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) , Aug. 2008.

"RingSTM: Scalable Transactions with a Single Atomic Instruction", by Michael Spear, Maged Michael and Christoph von Praun. 20th ACM Symp. on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA) , Jun. 2008.

"Inevitability Mechanisms for Software Transactional Memory", by Michael Spear, Maged Michael, and Michael Scott. 3rd ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Transactional Computing (TRANSACT) , Feb. 2008.

"Transaction Safe Nonblocking Data Structures" (brief announcement), by Virendra Marathe, Michael Spear and Michael Scott. 21st Intl. Symp. on Distributed Computing (DISC) , Sept. 2007.

"Delaunay Triangulation with Transactions and Barriers" , by Michael Scott, Michael Spear, Luke Dalessandro, and Virendra Marathe. Benchmarks track, IEEE Intl. Symp. on Workload Characterization (IISWC) , Sept. 2007.

"Capabilities and Limitations of Library-Based Software Transactional Memory in C++" , by Luke Dalessandro, Virendra Marathe, Michael Spear, and Michael Scott. 2nd ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Transactional Computing (TRANSACT) , Aug. 2007.

"Privatization Techniques for Software Transactional Memory" (brief announcement), by Michael Spear, Virendra Marathe, Luke Dalessandro, and Michael Scott. 26th ACM Symp. on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) , Aug. 2007. Extended version available as TR 915 , Computer Science Department, University of Rochester, Feb. 2007.

"Transactions and Privatization in Delaunay Triangulation" (brief announcement), by Michael Scott, Michael Spear, Luke Dalessandro, and Virendra Marathe. 26th ACM Symp. on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) , Aug. 2007.

"An Integrated Hardware-Software Aproach to Flexible Transactional Memory" , by Arrvindh Shriraman, Michael Spear, Hemayet Hossain, Virendra Marathe, Sandhya Dwarkadas, and Michael Scott. 34th Intl. Symp. on Computer Architecture (ISCA) , Jun. 2007. Earlier but expanded version available as TR 910 , Computer Science Department, Universiy of Rochester, Dec. 2006.

"Nonblocking Transactions Without Indirection Using Alert-on-Update" , by Michael Spear, Arrvindh Shriraman, Luke Dalessandro, Sandhya Dwarkadas, and Michael Scott. 19th ACM Symp. on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA) , Jun. 2007.

"Alert-on-Update: A Communication Aid for Shared Memory Multiprocessors (poster paper)" , by Michael Spear, Arrvindh Shriraman, Hemayet Hossain, Sandhya Dwarkadas, and Michael Scott. Twelfth ACM Symp. on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP) , Mar. 2007.

"Conflict Detection and Validation Strategies for Software Transactional Memory" , by Michael Spear, Virendra Marathe, William Scherer III, and Michael Scott. 20th Intl. Symp. on Distributed Computing (DISC) , Sept. 2006.

"Lowering the Overhead of Nonblocking Software Transactional Memory" , by Virendra Marathe, Michael Spear, Christopher Heriot, Athul Acharya, David Eisenstat, William Scherer III, and Michael Scott. Workshop on Languages, Compilers, and Hardware Support for Transactional Computing (TRANSACT) , June 2006. In conjunction with PLDI’06 . Earlier, extended version available as TR 893 , Computer Science Department, University of Rochester, Mar. 2006.

"Hardware Acceleration of Software Transactional Memory" , by Arrvindh Shriraman, Virendra Marathe, Sandhya Dwarkadas, Michael Scott, David Eisenstat, Christopher Heriot, William Scherer III, and Michael Spear. Workshop on Languages, Compilers, and Hardware Support for Transactional Computing (TRANSACT) , June 2006. In conjunction with PLDI’06 . Earlier, extended version available as TR 887 , Computer Science Department, University of Rochester, Dec. 2005, revised Mar. 2006.

"Solving the Starting Problem: Device Drivers as Self-Describing Artifacts" , by Michael Spear, Tom Roeder, Orion Hodson, Galen Hunt, and Steven Levi. EuroSys2006 , April 2006.

Just for Fun

Here are some provocative thoughts:
"Cargo Cult Science", by Richard Feynman
"Politics and the English Language", by George Orwell
"Systems Software Research is Irrelevant", by Rob Pike

Thanks, Luke

I borrowed a lot of css formatting for this page from Luke Dalessandro.


Last change: February 11, 2008     URCS People     URCS Home Page

Valid XHTML 1.0!