Bill Bush's Home Page

Contact information

Sun Microsystems, Inc. 
MS UMTV29-117
901 San Antonio Rd
Palo Alto, CA 94303, USA

Current Work

The Secure KVM

I'm currently working on a version of the KVM suitable for small, high-security devices. The work is being done in collaboration with D'Crypt, a maker of such devices.

The secure KVM project grew out of my work on the KVM, which in turn is based on a Sun Labs project, the Spotless system, started by Antero Taivalsaari and myself.

Prior Work

Program Analysis

Before coming to Sun, I was cofounder and principal scientist at Intrinsa Corporation. We developed a new analytic technique for automatically detecting programming errors, such as pointer errors, that previously were found either by runtime testing or by user-supplied assertions. The technique traces execution paths through source code, inferring values, modeling memory, and detecting inconsistencies. The company was acquired by Microsoft, which uses the tool to analyze all its products.

High-Level Hardware Synthesis

My Ph.D dissertation and post-doctoral work at U.C. Berkeley involved synthesizing hardware from high-level descriptions. The synthesizer automatically generated microprocessors, using instruction frequency information to control optimization. Within the context of global design constraints, the optimizer allocated resources to more frequently used instructions in order to improve the overall throughput of the synthesized design. The system also generated specialized microprocessors, omitting the hardware required only by unused instructions.

Papers on these and other topics can be found here.

Publications

Last modified: 9 January 2002