I exchanged email with him once, but that's it. I'm surprised to hear
he was at Transmeta at all.
> I loved this thesis work (Synthesis)
Me too. By the way, it appears that the web page his thesis was
previously on is no longer available, but I think I might have it lying
around on disk in PostScript form. Does anyone want a copy?
Synthesis included a bunch of extremely innovative things; even one of
them would have made a good thesis.
- very efficient run-time code synthesis (instead of attaching a vtable
of pointers to functions, you would attach a table of code)
- adaptive scheduling based on I/O streams, so you can get
real-time-like performance on things like audio, without the
inflexibility of typical real-time methods.
- lock-free synchronization -- the kernel ran on a dual-CPU machine,
but used no blocking synchronization techniques at all in order to
avoid deadlock. Instead, it used compare-and-swap exclusively.
Does anyone know what kind of followup work has been done? Surely
enough people were blown away by his work that there should be a few
Synthesis copycats, right?
-- <kragen@pobox.com> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/> [around 1998-12-23], it is amazing to watch fear and loathing and greed at play with the more speculative Internet stocks. To call this a tulip craze would be a vast understatement. -- Adam Rifkin, <adam@cs.caltech.edu>