Picture of me

David Tam

Ph.D. Graduate (completed April 2010)
University of Toronto
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
Computer Engineering Research Group

[ Status | Reseach | Résumé | Biography | Publications | Presentations | Posters | Tech Reports | Reading Groups | Courses | Misc | Contact ]

Status

I am currently a Staff Software Developer at the IBM Toronto Lab, working on parallel programming tools development.


Research Interests

My Ph.D. thesis, completed in April 2010, is on the topic of operating system management of shared caches on multicore processors. [abstract | thesis | slides]

My thesis supervisor was Michael Stumm. In retrospect, here is a research description that I wrote in October 2003 during my first year of doctoral studies.

My general research interests are in the design, implementation, performance, and optimization of:

My résumé.


Biography

University of Toronto:
Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Engineering: June 1999.
Master of Applied Science in Computer Engineering: June 2003.
Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Engineering: June 2010.

During graduate school, I worked on the K42 operating system at the university and at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. I have also been a visiting student at the IBM Centers for Advanced Studies, located at the IBM Toronto Software Laboratory.


Publications

"Enhancing Operating System Support for Multicore Processors by Using Hardware Performance Monitoring", R. Azimi, D. Tam, L. Soares, M. Stumm, ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS), Operating Systems Review (OSR), Special Issue on the Interaction Among the OS, Compilers, and Multicore Processors, Vol. 43, No. 2, Apr 2009, pp. 55-65.

"RapidMRC: Approximating L2 Miss Rate Curves on Commodity Systems for Online Optimizations", D. Tam, R. Azimi, L. Soares, M. Stumm, Int'l Conf. on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), Mar 2009, pp. 121-132.

"Reducing the Harmful Effects of Last-Level Cache Polluters with an OS-Level, Software-Only Pollute Buffer", L. Soares, D. Tam, M. Stumm, Int'l Symp. on Microarchitecture (MICRO), Nov 2008, pp. 258-269.

"Managing Shared L2 Caches on Multicore Systems in Software", D. Tam, R. Azimi, L. Soares, M. Stumm, Workshop on the Interaction between Operating Systems and Computer Architecture (WIOSCA), Jun 2007. Held in conjunction with the Int'l Symp. on Computer Architecture (ISCA), 2007, pp. 26-33.

"Thread Clustering: Sharing-Aware Scheduling on SMP-CMP-SMT Multiprocessors", D. Tam, R. Azimi, M. Stumm, European Conf. in Computer Systems (EuroSys), Mar 2007, pp. 47-58.

"K42: An Infrastructure for Operating System Research", D. Da Silva, O. Krieger, R.W. Wisniewski, A. Waterland, D. Tam, A. Baumann, ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Vol. 40, No. 2, Apr 2006, pp. 34-42.

"Building Content-Based Publish/Subscribe Systems with Distributed Hash Tables", D. Tam, R. Azimi, H.-A. Jacobsen, Workshop on Databases, Information Systems and Peer-to-Peer Computing, Sep 2003; Held in conjunction with the Int'l Conf. on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), 2003; Published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, LNCS 2944, Springer-Verlag, 2004, pp. 138-152.

"Enabling Scalable Performance for General Purpose Workloads on Shared Memory Multiprocessors", J. Appavoo, M. Auslander, D. Da Silva, O. Krieger, M. Ostrowski, B. Rosenburg, R.W. Wisniewski, J. Xenidis, M. Stumm, B. Gamsa, R. Azimi, R. Fingas, A. Tam, D. Tam, IBM Research Report RC22863, Jul 2003.

"Performance Analysis and Optimization of the Hurricane File System on the K42 Operating System", D. Tam, Master's thesis, Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Jan 2003.


Presentations

"RapidMRC: Approximating L2 Miss Rate Curves on Commodity Systems for Online Optimizations", D. Tam, R. Azimi, L. Soares, M. Stumm, Int'l Conf. on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), Mar 2009.

"Managing Shared L2 Caches on Multicore Systems in Software", D. Tam, R. Azimi, L. Soares, M. Stumm, Workshop on the Interaction between Operating Systems and Computer Architecture (WIOSCA), Jun 2007. Held in conjunction with the Int'l Symp. on Computer Architecture (ISCA), 2007.

"Thread Clustering: Sharing-Aware Scheduling on SMP-CMP-SMT Multiprocessors", D. Tam, R. Azimi, M. Stumm, European Conf. in Computer Systems (EuroSys), Mar 2007.

"Enhancing Operating System Algorithms through Hardware Performance Monitoring", R. Azimi, D. Tam, L. Soares, M. Stumm, Workshop on Functionality of Hardware Performance Monitors, Dec 2006; Held in conjunction with the Int'l Symp. on Microarchitecture (MICRO), 2006.

"Using Hardware Counters To Improve Dynamic Compilation", D. Tam, J. Wu, M. Voss, University of Toronto - IBM Compiler Seminar, Feb 2004.

"Building Content-Based Publish/Subscribe Systems with Distributed Hash Tables", D. Tam, R. Azimi, H.-A. Jacobsen, Workshop on Databases, Information Systems and Peer-to-Peer Computing, Sep 2003; Held in conjunction with the Int'l Conf. on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), 2003.


Posters

"Managing Shared Caches in Software", D. Tam,, R. Azimi, L. Soares, M. Stumm, A. Kielstra, IBM Centers for Advanced Studies Workshop Series: Compiler Workshop, Jun 2007.

"Thread Clustering: Sharing-Aware Scheduling on SMP-CMP-SMT Multiprocessors", D. Tam, R. Azimi, M. Stumm, A. Kielstra, IBM Centers for Advanced Studies Conference (CASCON), Oct 2006.

"Exploiting Modern Multiprocessors: From an OS Perspective", D. Tam, M. Stumm, A. Kielstra, IBM Centers for Advanced Studies Workshop Series: Compiler Workshop, Jun 2006.


Technical Reports

"Implementing Resource Containers in K42", A. Tam, D. Tam, R. Azimi, Apr 2003.

"Using Hardware Counters to Improve Dynamic Compilation", D. Tam, J. Wu, Dec 2003.

"Improving Data Locality During Thread-Level Speculation", A. Tam, D. Tam, Apr 2003.

"Dynamic Voltage Scaling in Mobile Devices", D. Tam, W. Tsang, C. Drula, Dec 2003.

"Encoding Mathematics", D. Tam, Apr 2000.

"Fortran D", D. Tam, May 2000.

"Multilayer Routing on Multichip Modules", D. Tam, Dec 1999.

"Enigma Machine Java Applet", D. Tam, Nov 1999.


Reading Groups

These are the reading groups that I attended on a weekly basis during graduate school.


Graduate Course Work


Miscellaneous


Contact Information

Email:
tamda@eecg.toronto.edu
[ K42 ] [ Computer Engineering | Computer Systems ] [ ECE | CS ] [ ApSc&Eng; | Arts&Sci; ] [ UofT ]

David Tam