Chris Brown
Research Fellow working on the ParaPhrase project and refactoring guru
University of St Andrews
Chris Brown is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of
St Andrews working in the area of Refactoring and Parallelism. Chris
received his Ph.D. from the University of Kent in 2008 under the
supervision of Simon Thompson, where he worked on the implementation of
the HaRe refactoring tool for Haskell. Chris now works full time on the
ParaPhrase project working towards building radically new refactoring
techniques and methodologies to exploit parallel skeleton and pattern
applications in both the functional and imperative domains. Chris has
published at major conferences in the field of functional programming
and refactoring. Chris is a keen classical guitarist in his spare time,
specialising in early, baroque and classical repertoires.
Chris Brown is Giving the Following Talks
Tutorial: Putting the Skeletons back in the Closet: Effective Parallel Programming in Erlang
Multicore architectures are here today, offering major advantages in terms of performance and low energy use. New chips like Intel's 60-core Xeon Phi co-processor point the way towards dramatically increased performance.
Do you need to take advantage of the ever-increasing number of cores in modern processors? Are you unsure how to tackle the exciting programming challenges that parallel computing introduces? This tutorial introduces new pattern-based techniques and tools for Erlang that allow the programmer to quickly and easily write effective parallel code. The tutorial introduces the free Erlang parallel programming library, Skel*, shows how to quickly and automatically introduce parallelism using dedicated refactorings in a standard text editor, and gives hands-on experience with a large multicore machine, leading the programmer step-by-step through the process of writing effective parallel code.
The tutorial is given by Kevin Hammond and Chris Brown, pioneers in the use of refactoring technology for parallel programming. Kevin Hammond has almost 30 years of parallel programming expertise, and deep knowledge of functional programming techniques; Chris Brown is a world leader in refactoring tools for functional languages.
