THOMAS Gaël

Improving the Design and the Performance of Managed Runtime Environments

With the advent of the Web and the need to protect users against malicious applications, Managed Runtime Environments (MREs), such as Java or .Net virtual machines, have become the norm to execute programs. Over the last years, my research contributions have targeted three aspects of MREs: their design, their safety, and their performance on multicore hardware. My first contribution is VMKit, a library that provides the most complex components of MREs to ease the development of new efficient MREs. My second contribution is I-JVM, a Java virtual machine that eliminates the eight known vulnerabilities that a component of the OSGi framework was able to exploit. My third contribution targets the improvement of the performance of MREs on multicore hardware, focusing on the efficiency of locks and garbage collectors: with a new locking mechanism that outperforms all other known locking mechanisms when the number of cores increases, and with a study of the bottlenecks incurred by garbage collectors on multicore hardware. My research has been carried out in collaboration with seven PhD students, two of which having already defended. Building on these contributions, in a future work, I propose to explore the design of the next generation of MREs that will have to adapt the application at runtime to the actual multicore hardware on which it is executed.

Phd defence : 09/28/2012

Jury members :

Emery Berger, Professeur associé, Université du Massachusetts Amherst, US [Rapporteur]
Jan Vitek, Professeur, Université de Purdue, US [Rapporteur]
Willy Zwaenepoel Professeur, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Suisse [Rapporteur]
Albert Cohen, Directeur de Recherche, INRIA Saclay, France
Bertil Folliot, Professeur, UPMC Sorbonne Université, France
Gilles Muller, Directeur de Recherche, INRIA Rocquencourt, France
Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat, Professeur, Université Erlangen-Nürnberg, Allemagne