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Invited Publication

David F. Bacon, Ravi Konuru, Chet Murthy, and Mauricio Serrano
Twenty Years of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation: A Selection (2003). To appear.

Thin locks were selected as one of the most influential contributions in last twenty years of the PLDI conference. This retrospective discusses the origins, subsequent improvements, and future direction of this work.

Refereed Publications

David F. Bacon, Ravi Konuru, Chet Murthy, and Mauricio Serrano
Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (Montreal, Canada, June 1998), ACM SIGPLAN Notices volume 33 number 6, pp. 258-268. Presentation.
To appear with a retrospective in Twenty Years of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation: A Selection (2003).

High performance synchronization for Java, now incorporated into most of IBM's Java virtual machines. When implemented in the JDK, mean application speedup was 1.22, maximum speedup was 1.7. Multiprocessor scalability also improved drammatically.

David F. Bacon, Stephen J. Fink, and David Grove
Proceedings of the Sixteenth European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (Málaga, Spain, June, 2002), B. Magnusson, ed., Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol. 2374, pp. 111-132. Presentation.

Most implementations of Java use two or three word object headers. We show that there are a variety of ways to represent this information using a single header word without any appreciable run-time performance penalty, while reducing memory consumption by 12%. We also show how this can be implemented in the IBM Jikes RVM as a pluggable module, thereby making the object model more well-documented, flexible, and amenable to experimentation.

Technical Reports and Unpublished Papers

David F. Bacon
Unpublished internal IBM document (declassified).

Description of the first thin lock implementation to be delivered, including C code for various lock operations and the x86 code for inlined fast paths.

David F. Bacon, Ravi Konuru, and Chet Murthy
Unpublished internal IBM document (declassified).

Detailed evaluation of the first thin lock implementation in IBM's AIX JVM, with detailed performance studies of various uni- and multi-processor architectures.

David F. Bacon
Unpublished. Presentation.

An earlier version of Thin Locks for Java, with a fully integrated mechanism for heavy-weight locks.