Bjarne Steensgaard

Optimists and pessimists are often equally wrong,
but optimists have more fun. (Unknown)

Professionally

I worked as a researcher in Microsoft Research from 1992 to 2007. Since 2007 I have been part of an incubation team at Microsoft that is an outgrowth of efforts started at Microsoft Research.

At Microsoft Research, I have worked in the areas of program representation, program analysis, compilers, automatic memory management, runtimes for managed programs, and operating systems. In the area of program analysis, I am probably most known for developing a points-to analysis based using type unification mechanisms, for which I received the Most Influential POPL Paper Award. I was one of the founding members of the teams that developed the Marmot and Bartok compilers and runtime systems. Bartok enabled the subsequent work on the Singularity operating system, which I have also worked on since its inception. Most recently I have been working on the development of copying garbage collectors with pause times measured in microseconds.

Prior to joining Microsoft, I worked on the Emerald distributed operating system (cf. The Development of the Emerald Programming Language from HOPL III), on semantic analysis of programs, and on partial evaluation.

Erdös number: 3 (Erez Petrank, Noga M. Alon, Paul Erdös)

Recent Professional Activities

Selected/Recent papers

• Gabriel Kliot, Erez Petrank, and Bjarne Steensgaard, A Lock-Free, Concurrent, and Incremental Stack Scanning Mechanism for Garbage Collectors, ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Volume 43 , Issue 3 (July 2009).
• Erez Petrank, Madan Musuvathi, Bjarne Steensgaard, Progress Guarantee for Parallel Programs via Bounded Lock-Freedom, in PLDI 2009: Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation.
• Gabriel Kliot, Erez Petrank, and Bjarne Steensgaard, A Lock-Free, Concurrent, and Incremental Stack Scanning for Garbage Collectors, in VEE'09: Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments, March 2009. Winner of the "Best Paper" award.
• Filip Pizlo, Erez Petrank, Bjarne Steensgaard, A study of concurrent real-time garbage collectors, in PLDI '08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation, pages 33-44, 2008.
• Filip Pizlo, Erez Petrank, Bjarne Steensgaard, Path Specialization: Reducing Phased Execution Overheads, in ISMM 2008: Proceedings of the 7th international symposium on Memory management, pages 81-90, 2008.
• Filip Pizlo, Daniel Frampton, Erez Petrank, Bjarne Steensgaard, Stopless: a real-time garbage collector for multiprocessors, in ISMM '07: Proceedings of the 6th international symposium on Memory management, pages 159-172, 2007.
• Galen Hunt, Mark Aiken, Manuel Fähndrich, Chris Hawblitzel, Orion Hodson, James Larus, Steven Levi, Bjarne Steensgaard, David Tarditi, Ted Wobber, Sealing OS Processes to Improve Dependability and Safety, in EuroSys 2007: Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, pages 341-354, 2007.
• Robert Fitzgerald, Todd B. Knoblock, Erik Ruf, Bjarne Steensgaard, David Tarditi, Marmot: An Optimizing compiler for Java, Software-Practice and Experience, 30(3):199-232, 2000.
• Bjarne Steensgaard, Points-to Analysis in Almost Linear Time, in POPL'96: Conference Record of the 23th Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, pages 32-41, 1996. Winner of the "Most Influential POPL Paper" award.

Personally