Personal Page: Susan Spence

I work as a Research Assistant on the Persistent Java (PJama) project (formerly known as the PJava project). The PJama project is a collaboration between the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow and Sun Microsystems Research Laboratories in Mountain View, California. The project started in September 1995 with the aim of investigating the feasability of supporting orthogonal persistence for Java. For more details on the project, talk to me or any of my fellow project members and we'll evangelise about the ease of programming with an orthogonally-persistent system; we might even try to explain, in simple terms, what the phrase "orthogonal persistence" means! Alternatively, see the Glasgow PJama WWW pages or have a look at the WWW pages on the latest PJama release from Sunlabs.

If you don't know what Java is and you consider yourself a member of the computing science community, you've probably been living like a hermit/very solitary hacker for the last couple of years. See the Java WWW pages for further info. Since SUN are currently funding my research post, I think they are a great company :-)

To find out more information about Java, go to JavaSoft's home page. These pages include introductions to the Java Development Kit and reams of related stuff. There is also a Java programming guide available which is well written and useful for getting to grips with the basics before hitting the bookshelves of your favourite bookshop to be overwhelmed by the already bewildering choice of Java books!

I am currently maintaining a departmental copy of the Java Development Kit. If you are a member of the Computing Science department and you have questions about the installation I will be happy to try and help you.

Before being embroiled in the heady, over-hyped world of Java, I worked for three years as a Research Assistant on the IMIS project. The IMIS project was funded by the European Commission's ESPRIT research program.

I spent the first year of the project working on the design of our Global Event Manager (GEM) and mastering the wonders of C++ while implementing a parser for our Data Control Language (DCL). In the second year onwards, fellow IMIS RA Huw Evans and I were buried in the implementation of GEM. This has involved getting to know C++ far better than I ever wanted to and mastering Sun's new implementation of threads in their Solaris 2 OS.

I share an office with Huw Evans, Craig Hamilton and Tony Printezis. Huw, who seems to have given up throwing pens at me, probably because he never gets them back, has spent most of the last three years tackling the wonders and terrors of the DRASTIC platform. The rest of us work on the PJama project. Craig patiently puts up with the noisiness and nosiness of his fellow office mates and all the random people that come avisiting our office. He, not so patiently, manages our source code repositories, when he's not working on logging and recovery for the latest implementation of PJama. Tony is our cheery, Greek demon-coder (or should that be hacker?) in the back office. Regular visitors to the office include the rest of the rather international PJama team. Our professor, Malcolm Atkinson, tries to manage our motley crew and generates a million new ideas for the next version of PJama, on a regular basis.

Then, in sunny California there's our German colleague Bernd and the French one, Laurent. Why they prefer coding in California rather than Glasgow is a mystery to me, of course. Brian Lewis and Neal Gafter are also members of the PJama project there. Misha from Russia, is a PhD student in Glasgow and currently our spy, sorry - an intern, at the labs. Mick Jordan has the pleasure of managing them.

We all spend far too much time in the office.

Research Interests

distributed object management and communication

long term maintenance of distributed, persistent object stores

orthogonal persistence

data storage and management

process groups

communication management in a distributed system

message ordering and causality

consistency in a distributed system

fault-tolerance and reliability

Since 1st January 1996, I have been officially registered for a part-time Phd, currently on the subject of "Support for Distributed and Persistent Object Stores over Wide-area Networks." I am currently writing this up, with the aim of completing by the end of the year 1999.

I recommend the following guide to doing a PhD for its excellant and realistic advice on the subject.

I am a lurking member of the excellant systers mailing list and, last year, I gave a talk at the Scottish Hoppers Computer Science Research Colloquium: A Colloquium for Women Researchers in Computer Science in Scotland.

Those of you who think the best way to a man is through his girlfriend will want to go here.