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Feng Xian

Addr:    1025 N, 23rd ST, APT 33, Lincoln, NE 68503     

E-mail:  fxian@cse.unl.edu

Phone:  (402)310-2914

URL:     http://cse.unl.edu/~fxian

 

EDUCATION

Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science and Engineering                           Aug’03 – Present

University of Nebraska-Lincoln

 

M.S.  in Computer Science                                                                    Aug’00 – July’03

Huazhong University of Science & Technology, China            

 

B.E. in Computer Science                                                                     Aug’95 – July’99

Chongqing University of Posts & Telecommunication, China

 

EXPERIENCE

     Graduate Research Assistant                                                                   Sept’04 – Present

Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Nebraska Lincoln

-          Developed a Service-Oriented Garbage Collector in Sun’s JVM 4.0 to reduce garbage collection overhead in Java Application Servers

-          Designed a hardware reference counting garbage collector using Stretch

-          Developed a distributed metadata server to reduce file look-up time of cluster-based storage system

 

      Senior Software Engineer and Project Manager                                     Sept’01 – Jun’02

Bluestar  Inc., Wuhan, China

-          Designed and developed a distributed dynamic firewall system

 

      Graduate Research Assistant                                                                  Sept’00 – May’03

 Huazhong University of Science & Technology, China

-          Designed and implemented a new load balancing system called DALB (Distributed Adaptive Load Balancing) for clusters

 

TECHNICAL EXPERTISE

·        Programming Language:  C, C++, Java, OO-Pascal (Delphi)

·        Java Virtual Machine:      Sun’s JVM, JikesRVM

·        Operating System:           Unix, Linux Kernel, Windows NT

·        Networking:                    TCP/IP, Wireless Routing Protocols, Firewall, IDS

·        J2EE:                              JBoss, EJB

·        Database:                        MySQL

·        Embedded System:           Stretch

·        Others:                            XML, HTML, PHP, Apache

 

PROJECTS

    MicroPause: A Phase-based Garbage Collection Triggering Mechanism

·     Implemented a phase-based garbage collection triggering scheme which can overcome shortcomings of traditional space-based triggering scheme. By detecting allocation pauses, MicroPause can identify locations to invoke garbage collection yielding high efficiency

·       Tools: Sun’s JDK1.4 source code, C++, SPECjvm98 benchmark suites

  

    SOGC: A Service-Oriented Garbage Collector

·        Implemented a server-side garbage collector in Sun’s JVM to improve garbage collection efficiency for J2EE server applications

·        Fixed several bugs of Sun’s JVM

·        Tools: Sun’s JDK1.4 source code, SPEC benchmark jAppServer2004, JBoss 4.0, Oracle 9i

 

    Investigating Throughput Degradation Behavior of Java Application Servers

·        Studied how garbage collection affects throughput degradation of Java Application Servers and identified several research directions that can improve efficiency of garbage collector to postpone performance degradation of servers

·        Tools: Sun’s JVM source code

　

    Hardware Reference Counting Collector using Software Configurable Processors

·        Used wide registers of the Stretch processor to speed up and parallelize reference manipulations in reference-counting collectors

·        Tools: C, C++, Stretch-C IDE and processor

 

    HBA-MS: A Distributed Metadata Management System

·       Implemented a distributed metadata system which uses HBA (Hierarchical Bloom Filter Arrays) to speed up file lookup time by mapping file names to the servers holding their metadata

·        Tools: C,  Socket programming

 

    µFirewall: A Distributed Dynamic Firewall System

·        Implemented a distributed intrusion prevention system that detects attacks and broadcasts firewall rules in order to proactively prevent the damage

·        Tools: Linux Kernel, Windows NT, OO-Pascal, Java

 

    DALB: A Distributed Adaptive Load Balancing Scheme for Cluster Systems

·        Modified Linux kernel (TCP/IP stack and IP firewall) and implemented a job competition scheme so that cluster nodes can achieve load balancing autonomously

·        Tools: Linux Kernel, C

 

JOURNAL PUBLICATIONS

·      F. Xian, W. Srisa-an, H. Jiang. Death on Arrival: Why did my Application Servers Crash?. Invited paper to  Science of Computer Programming -- Special Issue on Principles Practices and Programming in Java, Elsevier Science.

 

CONFERENCE PUBLICATIONS

·        F. Xian, W. Srisa-an, C. Jia, H. Jiang. AS-GC: An Efficient Generational Garbage Collector for Java Application Servers. To appear in the Proceedings of 21st European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP'07) [acceptance rate: 25/160=15.6%], Berlin, Germany. July 30-Aug 03, 2007

·       F. Xian, W. Srisa-an, and H. Jiang. Investigating Throughput Degradation Behavior of Java Application Servers: A View from Inside a Virtual Machine. In the Proceedings of the SIGPLAN/SIGAPP Conference on Principles and Practices of Programming In Java (PPPJ'06) [acceptance rate: 17/47=36.1%], Mannheim, Germany, Aug 30-Sep 1, 2006

·      F. Xian, W. Srisa-an, and H. Jiang. Evaluating Hardware Support for Reference Counting Using Software Configurable Processors. In the Proceedings of IEEE 17th International Conference on Application-specific Systems, Architectures, and Processors (ASAP'06) [acceptance rate: 24/90=26.7%], Steamboat Springs, Colorado, Sep 11-13, 2006

·      F. Xian, W. Srisa-an, H. Jiang. Service Oriented Garbage Collection: Improving Performance and Robustness of Application Servers. In Proceedings of ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA'06 Poster), Portland, Oregon. Oct 22-26, 2006  

·        F. Xian, W. Srisa-an, H. Jiang. Fortune Teller: Improving Garbage Collection Performance in Server Environment using Live Objects Prediction. In Proceedings of ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA'05 Doctorial Symposium), San Diego, CA. Oct 17, 2005.  ACM Press, Page 246-247, 2005

·        F. Xian, H. Jin, K. Liu, and Z. Han. A Mobile-Agent based Distributed Dynamic µFirewall Architecture. In Proceeding of the 9th IEEE Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS'02). Dec 17-20, 2002, Taiwan

·        F. Xian , K. Liu, H. Jin and Z. Han. Distributed Cooperative Intrusions Detection by Data Mining. In Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Future Software Technology (ISFST '02), 23-25, Oct 2002, Wuhan

·        H. Jin, F. Xian, Z. Han, S. Li. A Distributed Dynamic Firewall Architecture with Mobile Agents and KeyNote Trust Management System.  In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Information and Communications Security (ICICS'02) , Dec 9-12, Singapore, LNCS 2513, Page13-24, Springer-Verlag

·        H. Jin, K. Liu, F. Xian, Z. Han. A Distributed Dynamic Self-immunity Security Architecture. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Algorithms & Architectures for Parallel Processing (ICA3PP'02), IEEE Computer Society, Oct 23-25, 2002, Beijing, China. USA: IEEE Computer Society Press, Page 148-151

·        G. Tan, S. Wu, H. Jin, and F. Xian. A Scalable Parallel Video Server Based on Autonomous Network-attached Storage. In Proceedings of the 11th Parallel Computing (Parco'03). Sep 2-5, Dresden, Germany. Elsevier Science, Page 423-430, 2003

 

PATENTS

·        H. Jin, F. Xian and G. Tan. A Distributed Network Load Balancing Method. Chinese Patent: ZL02139288.9，Date: June 15, 2005

·        Z. Han, H. Jin, K. Liu and F. Xian. A Distributed Dynamic Network Security System. Chinese Patent: ZL02115957.2, Date: Aug 4, 2004

 

AWARDS

·        ACM SIGPLAN PAC Award, 2006

·        Outstanding Research Assistant Award, 2002