Emery Berger -

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PBS interview: cyber-security	PBS interview: cyber-terrorism	PBS interview: Internet hackery

Emery Berger is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the flagship campus of the UMass system. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. Professor Berger has been a Visiting Scientist at Microsoft Research and at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) / Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).

Professor Berger's research spans programming languages, runtime systems, and operating systems, with a particular focus on systems that transparently improve reliability, security, and performance. He is the creator of various widely-used software systems including Hoard, a fast and scalable memory manager that accelerates multithreaded applications (used by companies including British Telecom, Cisco, Royal Bank of Canada, SAP, and Tata, and on which the Mac OS X memory manager is based), and DieHard, an error-avoiding memory manager that directly influenced the design of the Windows 7 Fault-Tolerant Heap.

I am always recruiting strong PL/systems students to join my research group. If you are applying to UMass, especially from overseas, please read this first.

Selected blog posts:

Most Influential Paper of OOPSLA 2002: “Reconsidering Custom Memory Allocation”

Software Needs Seatbelts and Airbags (reddit discussion)

Doppio: run JVM bytecodes in your browser without any plug-ins (reddit discussion)

Take a Stand for Double-Blind Reviewing!

Dthreads: Efficient Deterministic Multithreading (reddit discussion)

Winning the War on Bugs

I'm a Mac (or, "Emery Inside")

Selected publications:

[PLDI 2014]	Doppio: Breaking the Browser Language Barrier
[PPoPP 2014]	Predator: Predictive False Sharing Detection
[ASPLOS 2013]	Stabilizer: Statistically Sound Performance Evaluation (draft) see stabilizer-tool.org
[CACM 2012]	Software Needs Seatbelts and Airbags
[OOPSLA 2012]	AutoMan: A Platform for Integrating Human and Digital Computation see automan-lang.org
[ACM TECS 2012]	PROARTIS: Probabilistically Analysable Real-Time Systems see proartis-project.eu
[SOSP 2011]	Dthreads: efficient deterministic multithreading see dthreads.org
[OOPSLA 2011]	Sheriff: precise detection and automatic mitigation of false sharing
[CCS 2010]	DieHarder: securing the heap
[ECRTS 2009]	Using Randomized Caches in Real-Time Systems
[OOPSLA 2009]	Grace: safe multithreaded programming for C/C++
[PLDI 2009]	Efficiently and precisely locating memory leaks and bloat
[OSDI 2008]	Redline: first class support for interactivity in commodity operating systems
[ASPLOS-XIII]	Archipelago: trading address space for reliability and security
[SenSys 2007]	Eon: a language and runtime system for perpetual systems
[FAST 2007]	TFS: a transparent file system for contributory storage
[PLDI 2007]	Exterminator: automatically correcting memory errors with high probability
[PLDI 2006]	DieHard: probabilistic memory safety for unsafe languages
[OSDI 2006]	CRAMM: virtual memory support for garbage-collected applications
[USENIX 2006]	Transparent contribution of memory
[USENIX 2006]	Flux: a language for programming high-performance servers
[OOPSLA 2005]	Quantifying the performance of garbage collection vs. explicit memory management
[PLDI 2005]	Garbage collection without paging
[OOPSLA 2002]	Reconsidering custom memory allocation
[PLDI 2001]	Composing high-performance memory allocators see HeapLayers.org
[ASPLOS-IX]	Hoard: a scalable memory allocator for multithreaded applications see hoard.org

full publication list

Recent & ongoing research projects include:

Automatic error detection, toleration, and correction
- DieHard : prevents crashes and reduces security vulnerabilities [PLDI06] -
  the inspiration for Windows 7's Fault-Tolerant Heap
- Exterminator: automatically corrects memory errors [CACM08, PLDI07]
- Grace: safe multithreaded programming for C/C++ [OOPSLA09]
- Dthreads: efficient deterministic multithreading [SOSP11]
- Archipelago: trades address space for reliability and security [ASPLOS08]
- Hound: efficiently and precisely locates memory leaks and bloat for C/C++ programs [PLDI09]
High-performance runtime systems
- HOARD, a memory manager that accelerates multithreaded programs [ASPLOS00]
  used by numerous companies & the inspiration for enhancements to the Mac OS X allocator
- Sheriff-Detect and Sheriff-Protect: Precise Detection and Automatic Mitigation of False Sharing [OOPLSA11]
- Bookmarking collection: garbage collection without paging [PLDI05]
- Quantifying the cost of GC vs. malloc [OOPSLA05]
- Transparency: lets background jobs unobtrusively use free memory & disk space [ACM TOS, FAST07,USENIX06]
OS support for high responsiveness and performance
- Redline: first-class support for interactivity in commodity operating systems [OSDI08]
- CRAMM: cooperative robust automatic memory management [OSDI06]
New programming languages
- Eon, the first energy-aware programming language[SenSys07]— see TurtleNet
- Flux, a programming language for building high-performance applications with "pipes" [USENIX06]

Systems at UMass: See the SUMA (Systems at UMass Amherst) page for links to the 22 systems researchers at UMass. In the area of systems, the UMass School of Computer Science was ranked #18 in the nation (US News, top 25 overall) and is moving on up. For more information about the UMass School of Computer Science, read our Computer Science booklet describing the School's faculty, students, education, and research.

Emery Berger

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