Robin Garner

Technology Services
Southern Cross University
Lismore, NSW, 2480
P: 02 6620 3281
E: Robin.Garner@gmail.com
O: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8402-7192

Research

My PhD research was on Memory Management. In particular I am interested in the effects that modern architectures have on the performance of the mechanisms of garbage collection. My supervisor was Steve Blackburn, and together with Daniel Frampton we maintain the MMTk memory management toolkit.

My PhD thesis, "The Design and Construction of High Performance Garbage Collectors" was submitted on 13 July, 2011. Yay!

DaCapo Benchmarks

I'm one of the maintainers of the Dacapo Benchmark suite, a set of open source Java benchmarks.

Jikes RVM

I'm a member of the Jikes RVM team, a high performance research-oriented Java virtual machine.

I'm currently working on documenting MMTk. A very incomplete and rough draft is available here, and represents MMTk as of October 2005.

HTMLWriter

I've written a very basic fluent library for creating HTML documents from Java. The project is housed here

Previous work

My Honours project involved porting the JMTk (now MMTk) memory management toolkit for use in C-based runtimes.

Publications

Journal papers

Blackburn, S. M., McKinley, K. S., Garner, R., Hoffman, C., Khan, A. M., Bentzur, R., Diwan, A., Feinberg, D., Frampton, D., Guyer, S. Z., Hirzel, M., Hosking, A., Jump, M., Lee, H., Moss, J. E. B., Phansalkar, A., Stefanovic, D., VanDrunen, T., von Dincklage, D., and Wiedermann, B.
Wake Up and Smell the Coffee: Evaluation Methodology for the 21st Century
Communications of the ACM, 51(8) pp 83--89, August 2008
pdf
@Article{BMG+:08, 
  author = {Stephen M. Blackburn and Kathryn S. McKinley and Robin Garner and Chris Hoffmann and Asjad M. Khan and Rotem Bentzur and Amer Diwan and Daniel Feinberg and Daniel Frampton and Samuel Z. Guyer and Martin Hirzel and Antony Hosking and Maria Jump and Han Lee and J. Eliot and B. Moss and Aashish Phansalkar and Darko Stefanovic and Thomas VanDrunen and Daniel von Dincklage and Ben Wiedermann}, 
  title = {{Wake Up and Smell the Coffee: Evaluation Methodology for the 21st Century}}, 
  journal = {Communications of the ACM}, 
  year = {2008}, 
  month = {August}, 
  publisher = {ACM Press}, 
  address = {New York, NY, USA}, 
  doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1378704.1378723}, 
  note = {Invited paper. CACM Research Highlights.}, 
}
  

Refereed conference papers

R. Garner, S. M. Blackburn, and D. Frampton,
A Comprehensive Evaluation of Object Scanning Techniques
ISMM '11: Proceedings of the Tenth International Symposium on Memory Management, San Jose, CA, USA, June 4-5, 2011.
pdf
@InProceedings{GBF:11, 
  author = {Robin Garner and Stephen M Blackburn and Daniel Frampton}, 
  title = {A Comprehensive Evaluation of Object Scanning Techniques}, 
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management, ISMM '11, San Jose, CA, USA, June 4 - 5}, 
  year = {2011}, 
  month = {jun}, 
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1993478.1993484}, 
  location = {San Jose, CA, USA}, 
}
  

Daniel Frampton, Stephen M. Blackburn, Perry Cheng, Robin Garner, David P. Grove, J. Eliot B. Moss and Sergey I. Salishev.
Demystifying Magic: High-level Low-level Programming.
VEE 2009: The 2009 ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments.
pdf

@Inproceedings{FBC+:09, 
  author = {Frampton, Daniel and Blackburn, Stephen M. and Cheng, Perry and Garner, Robin J. and Grove, David and Moss, J. Eliot B. and Salishev, Sergey I.},
  title = {Demystifying magic: high-level low-level programming}, 
  booktitle = {VEE '09: Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments}, 
  year = {2009}, 
  isbn = {978-1-60558-375-4}, 
  pages = {81--90}, 
  location = {Washington, DC, USA}, 
  doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1508293.1508305}, 
  publisher = {ACM}, 
  address = {New York, NY, USA}, 
}
  

Garner, R., Blackburn, S. M., Frampton, D.
Effective Prefetch for Mark-Sweep Garbage Collection
ISMM '07: Proceedings of the 2007 International Symposium on Memory Management
pdf source

@InProceedings{GBF:07, 
  author = {Robin Garner and Stephen M. Blackburn and Daniel Frampton}, 
  title = {Effective Prefetch for Mark-Sweep Garbage Collection}, 
  booktitle = {ISMM '07: Proceedings of the 2007 International Symposium on Memory Management}, 
  year = {2007}, 
  month = {October}, 
  publisher = {ACM}, 
  location = {Montreal, Canada}, 
  doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1296907.1296915}, 
  patch = {dacapo-oopsla-2006.tgz}, 
}
  

Blackburn, S. M., Garner, R., Hoffman, C., Khan, A. M., McKinley, K. S., Bentzur, R., Diwan, A., Feinberg, D., Frampton, D., Guyer, S. Z., Hirzel, M., Hosking, A., Jump, M., Lee, H., Moss, J. E. B., Phansalkar, A., Stefanovic, D., VanDrunen, T., von~Dincklage, D., Wiedermann, B.
The DaCapo Benchmarks: Java Benchmarking Development and Analysis
OOPSLA '06: Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-Oriented Programing, Systems, Languages, and Applications
pdf talk

@Inproceedings{BGH+:06, 
  author = {Stephen M. Blackburn and Robin Garner and Chris Hoffmann and Asjad M. Khang and Kathryn S. McKinley and Rotem Bentzur and Amer Diwan and Daniel Feinberg and Daniel Frampton and Samuel Z. Guyer and Martin Hirzel and Antony Hosking and Maria Jump and Han Lee and J. Eliot and B. Moss and Aashish Phansalkar and Darko Stefanovic and Thomas VanDrunen and Daniel von Dincklage and Ben Wiedermann}, 
  title = {{The DaCapo benchmarks: Java benchmarking development and analysis}}, 
  booktitle = {OOPSLA '06: Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications}, 
  year = {2006}, 
  isbn = {1-59593-348-4}, 
  pages = {169--190}, 
  location = {Portland, Oregon, USA}, 
  doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1167473.1167488}, 
  publisher = {ACM Press}, 
  address = {New York, NY, USA}, 
  }
  

Workshop papers

R. Garner
Porting the JMTk memory management toolkit
WOSSA'2004 - The First International Workshop on Object Systems and Software Architectures, Victor Harbour, SA, Australia, Jan 2004.
pdf

Thesis

The design and construction of high performance garbage collectors.
PhD thesis, Australian National University, 2012

JMTk: A portable memory management toolkit.
Honours thesis, Australian National University, 2003

Teaching

SessionRoleCourse CodeDescription
2007Course TutorCOMP2400Relational Databases
2007TutorCOMP1100Introduction to Programming and Algorithms
2006TutorCOMP3310Computer Networks
2006Tutor/Guest LecturerCOMP3420Database Systems
2005TutorCOMP2400Relational Databases
2005Tutor/Guest LecturerCOMP3420Database Systems
2004TutorCOMP2400Relational Databases
2004TutorCOMP3420Database Systems