Gary Rampaud, an MSc student in the School of Computing, has won a $5000 studentship from Google for the 2011 Summer of Code. This is the second year running that students from Kent have won Summer of Code studentships.

Gary will be porting alternative designs for Generational garbage collection to the Jikes Research Virtual Machine (Jikes RVM) project.

The Google Summer of Code is a global scheme that supports students to work on leading open source (freely available software) projects over the summer. Applicants submit a research proposal for a project of their choice and Google select the best entries. Since its inception in 2005, Google Summer of Code has supported over 3000 projects involving 100 countries.

Jikes RVM is widely used for research into programming language implementation and has led to almost 200 academic papers being published. While being a runtime system for Java, the widely used programming language, its novelty is that it is written almost completely in Java.

Garbage collection automatically recycles program memory when it is no longer required, without programmer intervention, and is a vital technology supporting applications from e-commerce to games on mobile phones. However, the recycling process can lead to temporary pauses as the program runs. Gary's work will explore how these pauses can be reduced.

Gary said:

"It's great to have Google support my work. I'm also honoured to have two world experts, Prof Eliot Moss from the University of Massachusetts and Dr Daniel Frampton from the Australian National University alongside Richard helping to mentor me."

Gary's supervisor at the University of Kent, Prof. Richard Jones, sits on the Steering Committee of the Jikes RVM project and is the organiser of its Summer of Code involvement. Richard said:

"We are once again grateful to Google for awarding Jikes RVM four studentships. Personally, I am delighted that Gary has been selected for one of them."

Google Summer of Code announced the award in April and work commenced on 23rd May and will last for three months.

By Mark Wheadon
Published 24 June 2011
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