Stefan Marr

Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer)
and Royal Society Industry Fellow

Stefan Marr I am working at the School of Computing at the University of Kent. My work focuses on programming language implementation techniques, complex concurrent systems, and tooling.

Much of work revolves around making interpreters faster, detecting and preventing concurrency bugs at run time, and use modern language runtime systems to provide programmers with better tooling.

For contact details see my page at the School of Computing.

Archive of posts with the tag Fork/Join

Oct 15, 2017: Debugging Concurrency Is Hard, but We Can Do Something About It!

When we have to debug applications that use concurrency, perhaps written in Java, all we get from the debugger is a list of threads, perhaps some information about held locks, and the ability to step through each thread separately.
Sep 17, 2014: Fork/Join Parallelism in the Wild: Documenting Patterns and Anti-Patterns in Java Programs using the Fork/Join Framework

Parallel programming is frequently claimed to be hard and all kind of approaches have been proposed to solve the complexity issues. The Fork/Join programming style introduced with Cilk enables the parallel decomposition of problems in a recursive divide-and-conquer style, and on the surface looks very simple with its minimalistic approach of having a fork and a join language construct. But is it actually simple to use? To find out, Mattias started to dig through the Java open source projects on GitHub and tried to identify common patterns. Next week, he will present our findings at PPPJ’14.
Nov 3, 2012: Brief Introduction to Multicore Programming

Yesterday, I gave a brief lecture at the University of Quilmes half an hour outside of Buenos Aires. Since the students were from all levels of the bachelor program, I tried to give them a little impression of why we have multicore processors in the first place, and how fork/join with work-stealing as well as event-loop actors could be used to program these systems.