Andy Cheadle

I am an industry-based Software Engineer specialising in high-performance and real-time systems. I studied for my PhD in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, and was supervised by Tony Field.

My research has focused on real-time incremental and generational garbage collection techniques for high-level functional and object oriented programming languages. I have previously implemented both work-based and time-based incremental generational garbage collectors for GHC, the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (this work was in conjunction with the GHC team at Microsoft Research, headed by Simon Peyton Jones). More recently, I have explored application of the techniques developed for GHC within the context of the Jikes Research Virtual Machine.

Current research:

• Exploitation of dynamic dispatch for the efficient implementation of runtime services. Particular focus is on distributed JVMs; Orthogonal Persistence for Java; and fault-tolerant and hot-swappable JVMs.
• Parallel Incremental Generational GC for GHC & Jikes RVM.
• Scalable, Distributed, In-memory Database Architectures.
• Virtual Time Execution of Java.
• Compilation of a strict subset of Haskell to GPGPUs.
• The ECLiPSe Constraint Logic Programming System.
• Addition of Real-time event support to GCspy.

My interests are in the following areas:

• Automatic dynamic memory management algorithms. In particular real-time garbage collection techniques.
• Runtime system support for high level languages and the analysis of performance overheads that the provision of these services impose.
• General program optimisation techniques and the optimisation of functional languages for efficient execution.
• Application performance, benchmarking and cache interactions.
• Programming language and compiler design and their implementation.
• (Realtime) Operating system design and implementation.

Book Chapters

Non-Stop Java
Cheadle, A.M., Field, A.J., and Nystrom-Persson J.
Java in Academia and Research, ISBN-10: 1463789459, ISBN-13: 978-1463789459, iConcept Press, 2011

Publications

A Method Specialisation and Virtualised Execution Environment for Java
Cheadle, A.M., Field, A.J., and Nystrom-Persson J.
International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments (VEE), Seattle, Washington, USA, 5-7 March 2008

Method Specialisation and Incremental Garbage Collection in Java
Cheadle, A.M., Field, A.J., and Nystrom-Persson J.

Visualising Dynamic Memory Allocators
Cheadle, A.M., Field, A.J., Ayres, J.W., Dunn N., Hayden, R.A. and Nystrom-Persson J.
International Symposium on Memory Management (ISMM), Ottawa, Canada, 10-11 June 2006

Exploring the Barrier to Entry - Incremental Generational Garbage Collection for Haskell
Cheadle, A.M., Field, A.J., Marlow S., Peyton Jones, S. and While, R.L.
International Symposium on Memory Management (ISMM), Vancouver, British Columbia, 24-25 October 2004

Non-stop Haskell
Cheadle, A.M., Field, A.J., Marlow S., Peyton Jones, S. and While, R.L.
International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP), Montreal, Canada, 18-20 September 2000

Dissertations

Soft Real-time Garbage Collection for Dynamic Dispatch Languages
PhD Thesis

Incremental Garbage Collection for Haskell
Master's Thesis

Industrial Research

Shared Memory Heap Layers - In-Memory Database Engine Design

Towards Dynamic Instrumentation for Performance Optimisation