Bruce Childers is the Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives in the School of Computing and Information, Chair of the Department of Information Culture and Data Stewardship, and a Professor in the Computer Science (CS) Department at the University of Pittsburgh. He graduated from the University of Virginia with a PhD (CS, 2000) and from the College of William and Mary with a BS (CS, 1991). His most recent work focuses on technology and cultural changes to advance transparency, reuse, and reproducibility in computationally-driven science. Childers is a passionate advocate of increasing accountability in computer systems research for more reproducible and open experimentation. Try our prototype for actively curating experiments with computer system simulators! He also does research at the intersection of the software-hardware boundary for improved energy, performance, and reliability in computer systems design, with an emphasis on embedded systems. He has developed techniques at both the software layer (dynamic binary translation, compiler optimization, debugging and software testing) and the hardware layer (asynchronous custom processors, speed scaling, reliable cache design, and storage class memory). Childers participates in numerous international and national activities, including past chair of the ACM SIGPLAN and SIGBED Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (2012-2015), program chair for LCTES (2010) and PPPJ (2014), member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the Computer Languages, Systems and Structures Journal, member of the organizing commmittee for the Workshop on Modeling and Simulation of Systems and Applications, and member of the steering committee for the International Conference on the Principles and Practice of Progamming in Java. He participates in ACM task forces on issues about scientific reproducibility in computer science research. He is the former co-director of the Computer Engineering graduate program at Pitt.
A recent curriculum vitae is available.
Workflow Systems: OCCAM from Rachel Kelly on Vimeo.
Companion slides (PDF) to the video of the talk.
Talk given at the Modeling the World's Systems Conference, May 22, 2018, Pittsburgh, PA.
June 24, 2017: We are giving a tutorial about The Structural Simulation Toolkit (SST) and OCCAM at ISCA 2017. Come and learn how to create, run, share and repeat your simulations anywhere at anytime with anyone!
March 16, 2017: Here is a video demonstrating a use case of OCCAM, where a reader of a paper interacts with experiments from the paper. This shows how interactive, modifiable experiments might be associated with a paper. Enjoy!
December 8, 2016: Musfiq successfully defended his PhD thesis, Continuous Online Memory Diagnostics. Musfiq developed a novel framework for online software memory diagnostics to continously check memory health in a range of systems from desktops to NUMA servers. His approach imposes minimal performance impact on executing applications. Way to go, Dr. Rahman!
A complete list of publications is available.
Quality of Service Support for Fine-Grained Sharing on GPUs, Zhenning Wang, Jun Yang, Rami Melhem, Bruce R. Childers, Youtao Zhang and Minyi Guo, International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), Toronto, Canada, June 2017
On the Restore Time Variations of Future DRAM Memory, Xianwei Zhang, Youtao Zhang, Bruce R. Childers and Jun Yang, ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES), Volume 22, Issue 2, February 2017
Restore Truncation for Performance Improvement in Future DRAM Systems, Xianwei Zhang, Youtao, Zhang, Bruce R. Childers and Jun Yang, IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture, Barcelona, Spain, March 2016
Simultaneous Multikernel GPU: Multi-tasking Throughput Processors via Fine-Grained Sharing, Zhenning Wang, Jun Yang, Rami Melhem, Bruce R. Childers, Youtao Zhang and Minyi Guo, IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture, Barcelona, Spain, March 2016
Supporting Superpages in Non-Contiguous Physical Memory, Yu Du, Miao Zhou, Bruce R. Childers, Daniel Mosse' and Rami Melhem, IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture, San Francisco, California, February 2015
COMeT+: Continuous Online Memory Testing with Multi-threading Extension Musfiq Rahman, Bruce R. Childers and Sangyeun Cho, IEEE Transactions on Computers (TC) Volume 63, Issue 7, July 2014
Writeback-Aware Bandwidth Partitioning for Multi-core Systems with PCM, Miao Zhou, Yu Du, Bruce R. Childers, Rami Melhem, and Daniel Mosse', International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT), Edinburgh, Scotland, September 2013
Bit Mapping for Balanced PCM Programming, Yu Du, Miao Zhou, Bruce R. Childers, Daniel Mosse', and Rami Melhem International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), Tel Aviv, Israel, June 2013
FPB: Fine-grained Power Budgeting to Improve Write Throughput of Multi-level Phase Change Memory, Lei Jiang, Youtao Zhang, Bruce R. Childers and Jun Yang, The 45th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposum on Microarchitecture (MICRO), Vancouver, Canada, December 2012
Improving Write Operations in MLC Phase Change Memory, Lei Jiang, Bo Zhao, Youtao Zhang, Jun Yang, and Bruce R. Childers, International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), New Orleans, Louisiana, February 2012