Project Tuva Enhanced Video Player

Tim Harris

I am a researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge (UK) where I work with the Cambridge Systems & Networking Group, the Programming Principles and Tools Group, and the BSC-Microsoft Joint Research Centre. My main research interests are in the design and implementation of programming languages and managed runtime environments to support multi-threaded and multi-processor software.

Community service

I currently serve as vice-chair of EuroSys, the SIGOPS European Chapter. This year I am on the steering committee for TRANSACT, the programme committees for VEE 2010, IPDPS 2010, ASPLOS 2010, and SSS 2009. In the past I have served on the programme committee for PODC 2009, ESOP 2009, ASPLOS 2009, PPoPP 2009, DISC 2008, EuroSys Doctoral Workshop 2008, PPoPP 2008, VEE 2007, ISMM 2007, OOPSLA 2007, PLDI 2007, EuroSys 2007, DISC 2006, PODC 2006, PPoPP 2006, EuroSys Doctoral Workshop 2005 (chair), SCOOL 2005 (co-chair), VEE 2005, PODC CSJP Workshop 2004, and been a reviewer for numerous conferences and journals such as OOPSLA, OSDI, PLDI, POPL, SOSP, TOCS and TOPLAS.

Selected work

Tim Harris. Language constructs for transactional memory (or: transactional memory and atomic blocks are not the same thing) Invited talk, POPL, January 2009
Martín Abadi, Tim Harris, Mojtaba Mehrara. Transactional memory with strong atomicity using off-the-shelf memory protection hardware PPoPP, February 2009
Martín Abadi, Andrew Birrell, Tim Harris, Michael Isard. Semantics of Transactional Memory and Automatic Mutual Exclusion POPL 2008
Tim Harris, Satnam Singh. Feedback directed implicit parallelism ICFP 2007
Keir Fraser, Tim Harris. Concurrent programming without locks ACM TOCS, May 2007
Miguel Castro, Manuel Costa, Tim Harris. Securing software by enforcing data-flow integrity OSDI 2006
Tim Harris, Mark Plesko, Avraham Shinnar, David Tarditi. Optimizing Memory Transactions PLDI 2006
Tim Harris, Simon Marlow, Simon Peyton-Jones, Maurice Herlihy. Composable memory transactions PPoPP 2005
Tim Harris, Keir Fraser. Language Support for Lightweight Transactions OOPSLA 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 SOSP 2003

All publications by year

Martín Abadi, Tim Harris. Perspectives on Transactional Memory CONCUR, September 2009 (invited paper, to appear)
Cosmin E. Oancea, Alan Mycroft and Tim Harris. A Lightweight In-Place Implementation for Software Thread-Level Speculation SPAA, August 2009 (to appear)
Vladimir Gajinov, Ferad Zyulkyarov, Adrián Cristal, Osman S. Unsal, Eduard Ayguadé, Tim Harris, Mateo Valero QuakeTM: Parallelizing a Complex Serial Application Using Transactional Memory ICS, June 2009 (to appear)
Nehir Sonmez, Adrian Cristal, Tim Harris, Osman S. Unsal, Mateo Valero. Taking the heat off transactions: dynamic selection of pessimistic concurrency control IPDPS, May 2009
Amitabha Roy, Steven Hand, Tim Harris. A Runtime System for Software Lock Elision EuroSys, March 2009
Amitabha Roy, Steven Hand, Tim Harris. Exploring the limits of disjoint access parallelism HotPar, March 2009
Martín Abadi, Andrew Birrell, Tim Harris, Johnson Hsieh, Michael Isard. Implementation and use of transactional memory with dynamic separation Compiler Construction, March 2009
Martín Abadi, Tim Harris, Mojtaba Mehrara. Transactional memory with strong atomicity using off-the-shelf memory protection hardware PPoPP, February 2009
Ferad Zyulkyarov, Vladimir Gajinov, Osman S. Unsal, Adrian Cristal, Eduard Ayguade, Tim Harris, Mateo Valero. Atomic Quake: using transactional memory in an interactive multiplayer game server PPoPP, February 2009
Nehir Sonmez, Adrián Cristal, Osman Unsal, Tim Harris, Mateo Valero. Profiling Transactional Memory applications on an atomic block basis: A Haskell case study MULTIPROG, January 2009
Martín Abadi, Tim Harris, Katherine Moore. A model of dynamic separation for transactional memory CONCUR, August 2008
Simon Marlow, Tim Harris, Roshan P. James, Simon Peyton Jones. Parallel generational-copying garbage collection with a block-structured heap. ISMM, June 2008
Cristian Perfumo, Nehir Sonmez, Srdjan Stipic, Osman Unsal, Adrian Cristal, Tim Harris, Mateo Valero. The Limits of Software Transactional Memory (STM): Dissecting Haskell STM Applications on a Many-Core Environment. ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers, May 2008
E. Vallejo, S. Sanyal, T. Harris, F. Vallejo, R. Beivide, O. Unsal, A. Cristal, M. Valero. Towards fair, scalable, locking Workshop on Exploiting Parallelism with Transactional Memory and other Hardware Assisted Methods (EPHAM 2008), April 2008
Martín Abadi, Andrew Birrell, Tim Harris, Johnson Hsieh, Michael Isard. Dynamic Separation for Transactional Memory MSR-TR-2008-43, March 2008
Enrique Vallejo, Tim Harris, Adrian Cristal, Osman Unsal, Mateo Valero. Hybrid Transactional Memory to Accelerate Safe Lock-based Transactions TRANSACT, February 2008
Martín Abadi, Andrew Birrell, Tim Harris, Michael Isard. Semantics of Transactional Memory and Automatic Mutual Exclusion POPL, January 2008. A technical report containing notes on definitions and proofs is also available.
Tim Harris, Satnam Singh. Feedback directed implicit parallelism ICFP, October 2007
F. Zyulkyarov, O. Unsal, A. Cristal, M. Milovanovic, E. Ayguade, M. Valero, T. Harris. Memory Management for Transaction Processing Core in Heterogeneous Chip Multiprocessors Workshop on Operating System support for Heterogeneous Multicore Architectures (OSHMA), September 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 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

Microsoft Research Ltd
Roger Needham Building
J J Thomson Avenue
Cambridge, CB3 0FB
United Kingdom

Tel: +44 1223 479700
Fax: +44 1223 479999