Dr. Ben L Titzer Member of Technical Staff
Maxine Project
Sun Microsystems Laboratories
16 Network Circle umpk16-158 Menlo Park, CA 94025
Ben L. Titzer has been a Member of Technical staff at Sun Microsystems Laboratories since October 2007, where he works on the Maxine project, a meta-circular Java virtual machine written in Java. His expertise centers around compilers and programming languages, and he is currently the technical lead on C1X, a VM-independent port of the HotSpot™ Client compiler to Java. Prior to C1X, Ben contributed to many parts of Maxine, including the automated testing framework, the template-based JIT, the recompilation subsystem, and weak references.
Ben's interests have always centered around compilers and programming languages. In his doctoral work he designed and implemented Virgil, a lightweight, object-oriented language for microcontroller-class devices such as sensor nodes. Careful language design and novel compiler techniques led to the development of an advanced program reachability analysis and numerous space-oriented compiler optimizations.
But there have been some slight detours along the way. For his masters work, Ben designed and built the Avrora simulator, a cycle-accurate AVR emulator with hardware emulation of the CC1000 and CC2420 radio chips that allows large-scale sensor network simulations. Avrora has become one of the standard tools used by sensor network researchers and is now a mature open source project with an active user base and dozens of contributors.
