Two computing researchers from the University of Kent have been awarded a grant of £367,637 by the EPSRC for a project entitled 'Garbage collection for multicore systems'. The project begins in March 2010 and will run for three years.

Garbage collection automatically recycles the memory used by modern programming languages and is a vital technology supporting applications from e-commerce to games on mobile phones.

Richard Jones, Reader in Computer Systems, and Fred Barnes, Lecturer, both from the School of Computing, will explore the challenge of implementing high performance garbage collectors on modern parallel hardware.

Richard Jones is an international expert in the area of garbage collection, an ACM Distinguished Scientist and and Honary Fellow of the University of Glasgow. He co-founded the International Symposium in Memory Management, the leading conference series in this field. He is currently jointly authoring a new book on garbage collection and has also been instrumental in developing a new Masters course at Kent, the MSc in Advanced Programming for Multi-core Systems, which is believed to be the first in the world to focus on this technology.

Dr Fred Barnes has research interests which centre around the CSP model of parallel processing, encapsulated by the occam-pi multi-processing language. He is also interested in parallel computing on networks of workstations (NoWs). Other research interests include programming language design, implementation and semantics, operating systems, embedded systems and robotics.

Published 8 January 2010
Contact: M.L.Bowman@kent.ac.uk