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MCKINLEY, KATHRYN S

Kathryn S McKinley




Programming Languages and Implementation Security

Professor McKinley is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft. She holds an Endowed Professorship in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph.D. from Rice University working with Ken Kennedy.

Research Interests

McKinley's research interests are broad and include compilers, memory management, runtime systems, programming languages, debugging, reliability, security, and architecture. She and her collaborators have produced a number of tools that are in wide research and industrial use, e.g., the DaCapo Java Benchmarks, the TRIPS Compiler, the Hoard memory manager, the MMTk garbage collector toolkit, and the Immix mark-region garbage collection algorithm.

Selected Publications 

"Looking Back on the Language and Hardware Revolutions: Measured Power, Performance, and Scaling," H. Esmaeilzadeh, T. Cao, X. Yang,S. M. Blackburn, and K. S. McKinley, ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), March, 2011.

"The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?" Samuel H. Fuller and Lynette I. Millett, Editors, National Research Council Committee on Sustaining Growth in Computing Performance (member), National Academies Press, 2011.

"An Evaluation of the TRIPS Computer System," M. Gebhart, B. Maher, J. Burrill, K. Coons, J. Diamond, P. Gratz, M. Marino, N. Ranganathan, B. Robatmili, A. Smith, D. Burger, S. W. Keckler, and K. S. McKinley, ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), Washington, D.C., March 2009. Best Paper Award.

"Wake up and Smell the Coffee: Evaluation Methodology for the 21st Century," S. M. Blackburn, K. S. McKinley, et al., Communications of the ACM, 51(8):83-89, Aug. 2008. Invited Research Highlight.

"Immix: A Mark-Region Garbage Collector with Space Efficiency, Fast Collection, and Mutator Performance," S. M. Blackburn and K. S. McKinley, The ACM Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), pp.~22-32, Tucson, AZ, June 2008.

"Probabilistic Calling Context," M. D. Bond and K. S. McKinley, ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA), Montreal, Canada, pp.~97-112, October 2007.

  • IEEE Fellow
  • ACM Fellow
  • ASPLOS Best Paper Award, 2009
  • CACM Research Highlights Invited Paper, 2008
  • College of Natural Science's Innovative Outreach Program Award, 2006
  • IBM Faculty Award, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008
  • NSF CAREER Award, 1996-2000
  • DARPA/NASA Assistantship in Parallel Processing, 1991-1992