Semantics of atomic blocks. The slides I've presented about the semantics of simple atomic blocks and the idea of providing strong semantics for 'correctly synchronized' programs over an STM implementation are here.

Atomic blocks for managed code. Our work at PLDI 2006 on Optimizing Memory Transactions described a new direct-update STM implementation, compiler optimizations for improving the performance of code using it, and integration between the STM and the rest of the runtime system. My older work on atomic blocks built over transactional memory in managed runtime systems is the paper Language support for lightweight transactions at OOPSLA 2003.

Transactional memory design and implementation. The best introduction to the work I've done with Keir Fraser on the design and implementation of software transactional memories is the paper Concurrent programming without locks in ACM TOCS.

Conference involvement

This year I am on the steering committee for TRANSACT, and the programme committees for EuroSys 2007, PLDI 2007, OOPSLA 2007, ISMM 2007, VEE 2007, and PPoPP 2008. In the past I have served on the programme committee for PODC CSJP Workshop 2004, VEE 2005, SCOOL 2005 (co-chair), The 2005 EuroSys Doctoral Workshop (chair), PPoPP 2006, PODC 2006, DISC 2006 and been a reviewer for numerous conferences and journals such as POPL, PLDI, OOPSLA, SOSP, OSDI, TOPLAS and TOCS.

Publications by Year

• Martin Abadi, Andrew Birrell, Tim Harris, Michael Isard. Semantics of Transactional Memory and Automatic Mutual Exclusion POPL, Jan 2008
• Tim Harris, Satnam Singh. Feedback directed implicit parallelism ICFP, Oct 2007
• Tim Harris, Srdjan Stipic. Abstract nested transactionsTRANSACT, August 2007
• Cristian Perfumo, Nehir Sonmez, Osman S. Unsal, Adrian Cristal, Mateo Valero, Tim Harris. Dissecting transactional execution in Haskell TRANSACT, August 2007
• Tim Harris, Adrian Cristal, Osman S Unsal, Eduard Ayguade, Fabrizio Gagliardi, Burton Smith, Mateo Valero. Transactional memory: an overview IEEE Micro Special Issue: Hot Tutorials, May/June 2007
• Keir Fraser, Tim Harris. Concurrent programming without locks (draft) ACM TOCS, May 2007
• Tim Harris, Eric Koskinen. Optimizing across interfaces under submission
• Miguel Castro, Manuel Costa, Tim Harris. Securing software by enforcing data-flow integrity OSDI 2006 Nov 2006
• Evangelos Kotsovinos, Iulia Ion, Tim Harris. Resource Management for Global Public Computing: Many Policies Are Better Than (N)one USENIX WORLDS 2006 Nov 2006
• Tim Harris. Leaky regions: linking reclamation hints to program structure June 2006 Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2006-84
• Tim Harris, Mark Plesko, Avraham Shinnar, David Tarditi. Optimizing Memory Transactions June 2006 PLDI '06: ACM SIGPLAN 2006 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation
• Tim Harris, Simon Peyton-Jones. Transactional memory with data invariants June 2006 TRANSACT '06
• Anthony Discolo, Tim Harris, Simon Marlow, Simon Peyton-Jones, Satnam Singh. Lock Free Data Structures using STMs in Haskell April 2006 FLOPS '06: Proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium on Functional and Logic Programming
• Paul Barham, Rebecca Isaacs, Richard Mortier, Tim Harris. Learning communication patterns in Singularity March 2006 First Workshop on Tackling Computer Systems Problems with Machine Learning Techniques (SysML)
• Tim Harris, Keir Fraser. Revocable locks for non-blocking programming June 2005 New York, NY, USA PPoPP '05: Proceedings of the tenth ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming 72--82
• Tim Harris, Simon Marlow, Simon Peyton-Jones, Maurice Herlihy. Composable memory transactions 2005 New York, NY, USA PPoPP '05: Proceedings of the tenth ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming 48--60
• David Spence, Jon Crowcroft, Steven Hand, Tim Harris. Location Based Placement of Whole Distributed Systems October 2005 Proceedings of the 2005 ACM conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies 124--134
• Chris Purcell, Tim Harris. Non-Blocking Hashtables with Open Addressing September 2005 DISC 2005: Proceedings of the 19th International Symposium on Distributed Computing
• Tim Harris, Simon Marlow, Simon Peyton Jones. Haskell on a Shared-Memory Multiprocessor September 2005 Haskell '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Haskell 49--61
• Chris Purcell, Tim Harris. Implementing Multi-word Atomic Snapshots on Current Hardware (short) 2004 PODC: 23th ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing
• Tim Harris. Exceptions and side-effects in atomic blocks July 2004 Workshop on COncurrency and Synchronization in Java Programs 46-53
• Evangelos Kotsovinos, Tim Moreton, Ian Pratt, Russ Ross, Keir Fraser, Steven Hand, Tim Harris. Global-scale service deployment in the XenoServer platform December 2004 Proceedings of the First Workshop on Real, Large Distributed Systems
• Tim Harris, Keir Fraser. Language Support for Lightweight Transactions October 2003 Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Langauges & Applications (OOPSLA '03) 388-402
• Jean Bacon, Tim Harris. Operating Systems: Concurrent and Distributed Software Design 2003 3rd
• Keir Fraser, Steven Hand, Tim Harris, Ian Leslie, Ian Pratt. The Xenoserver computing infrastructure January 2003 University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory UCAM-CL-TR-552
• Steven Hand, Tim Harris, Evangelos Kotsovinos, Ian Pratt. Controlling the XenoServer Open Platform April 2003
• Paul Barham, Boris Dragovic, Keir Fraser, Steven Hand, Tim Harris, Alex Ho, Rolf Neugebauer, Ian Pratt, Andrew Warfield. Xen and the Art of Virtualization October 2003 Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '03)
• Tim Harris. Design choices for language-based transactions August 2003 University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory UCAM-CL-TR-572
• David Spence, Tim Harris. XenoSearch: distributed resource discovery in the XenoServer open platform June 2003 216--225
• Marcelo Pias, Jon Crowcroft, Steve Wilbur, Tim Harris, Saleem Bhatti. Lighthouses for scalable distributed location February 2003 2nd International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS '03)
• Boris Dragovic, Steven Hand, Tim Harris, Evangelos Kotsovinos, Andrew Twigg. Managing trust and reputation in the XenoServer Open Platform May 2003 Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Trust Management
• Barham, Paul R., Dragovic, Boris, Fraser, Keir A., Hand, Steven M., Harris, Timothy L., Ho, Alex C., Kotsovinos, Evangelos, Madhavapeddy, Anil V.S., Neugebauer, Rolf, Pratt, Ian A., Warfield, Andrew K.. Xen 2002 January 2003 University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory UCAM-CL-TR-553
• Ian A Pratt, Timothy Moreton, Tim Harris. Storage, mutability and naming in Pasta April 2002 International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Computing
• Tim Harris. Dependable Computing needs Pervasive Debugging September 2002 Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS European Workshop
• Tim Harris, Keir Fraser, Ian Pratt. A practical multi-word compare-and-swap operation October 2002 Proceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Distributed Computing 265--279
• Tim Harris. Dynamic Adaptive Pre-Tenuring January 2001 International Symposium on Memory Management (ISMM '00) 127--136 ACM SIGPLAN Notices 36(1)
• Tim Harris. A Pragmatic Implementation of Non-Blocking Linked Lists October 2001 Proceedings of the 15th International Symposium on Distributed Computing 300-314 Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2180
• Tim Harris. Extensible Virtual Machines October 2001 Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge
• Tim Harris. Early storage reclamation in a tracing garbage collector April 1999 ACM SIGPLAN Notices 4 46-53 34
• Tim Harris. An Extensible Virtual Machine Architecture November 1999 Proceedings of the OOPSLA'99 Workshop on Simplicity, Performance and Portability in Virtual Machine Design
• Tim Harris. Controlling run-time compilation December 1998 IEEE Workshop on Programming Languages for Real-Time Industrial Applications 75--84

Contact details

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