Table of Contents

Education

Australian National University (2021-, Canberra, ACT, Australia)

Australian National University (2017-2020, Canberra, ACT, Australia)

Research and Industry Experience

Australian National University (2017-, Canberra, ACT, Australia)

Google Research (2022, Pyrmont, NSW, Australia)

Twitter (2020-2021, Canberra, ACT, Australia)

Microsoft Research (2020, Canberra, ACT, Australia)

Microsoft Research (2019-2020, Redmond, WA, USA)

Publications

Peer-Reviewed Conference Papers

Distilling the Real Cost of Production Garbage Collectors. Zixian Cai, Stephen M. Blackburn, Michael D. Bond, Martin Maas. International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS), 2022. pdf doi code video

Understanding and Utilizing Hardware Transactional Memory Capacity. Zixian Cai, Stephen M. Blackburn, Michael D. Bond. International Symposium on Memory Management (ISMM), 2021. pdf doi code video

Synthesizing Optimal Collective Algorithms. Zixian Cai, Zhengyang Liu, Saeed Maleki, Madan Musuvathi, Todd Mytkowicz, Jacob Nelson, Olli Saarikivi. Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP), 2021. Best Paper Award. pdf doi code (SCCL) code (MSCCL) video

Technical Reports

Activity Recognition in Videos with Segmented Streams. Zixian Cai. ANU SCNC2103, 2019. Supervised by Stephen Gould. pdf doi

Verification of Concurrent Data Structures with TLA. Zixian Cai. ANU SCNC2102, 2018. Supervised by Michael Norrish. pdf doi

Power Consumption of Instruction Encodings on Cortex-M4. Zixian Cai. ANU COMP2300 ASE, 2018. Supervised by Ben Swift. pdf doi

Have Your Cake and Eat It? Productive Parallel Programming via Chapel’s High-level Constructs. Zixian Cai. ANU SCNC2101, 2018. Supervised by Josh Milthorpe. pdf doi

Theses

Concurrent Copying Garbage Collection with Hardware Transactional Memory. Zixian Cai. Bachelor of Philosophy (Honours) - Science, Australian National University, 2020. Advised by Steve Blackburn and Mike Bond (OSU). pdf doi

Awards

PPoPP Best Paper Award (2021)

ANU University Medal (2020)

ANU Chancellor’s Letter of Commendation (2017, 2018, 2019, 2020)

ANU Burton and Garran Hall Distinguished Scholar Award (2017, 2018, 2019)

Teaching Experience

ANU COMP3710, Computer Microarchitecture

ANU COMP3703, Software Security

ANU COMP3710, Compiler Design and Implementation

Students

Adding ARMv8 support to MMTk/OpenJDK. Open Source Promotion Plan (2023 Q3). Mentor.

Claire Huang. Debugging GC Performance Problems with eBPF Tools. ANU undergraduate project course (2022 Semester 2). Primary supervisor, co-supervised with Steve Blackburn.

Service

Conferences

Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), 2024. Organizing Committee, Video Co-Chair.

Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), 2023. Organizing Committee, Video Co-Chair.

Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), 2023. Artifact Evaluation Committee.

Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), 2023. Artifact Evaluation Committee.

Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH), 2022. Organizing Committee, Video Co-Chair.

Programming Languages Design and Implementation (PLDI), 2022. Artifact Evaluation Committee.

Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), 2022. Artifact Evaluation Committee.

Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH), 2021. Streaming Operator.

Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH), 2020. Student Volunteer.

University

ANU PhB Student Mentoring Program, 2019. Mentor.

Talks

Distilling the Real Cost of Production Garbage Collectors. Zixian Cai. International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS), 2022. YouTube

Understanding and Utilizing Hardware Transactional Memory Capacity. Zixian Cai. International Symposium on Memory Management (ISMM), 2021. YouTube

Activity Recognition in Videos with Segmented Streams. Zixian Cai. ANU PhB Symposium, 2019 for SCNC2103.

Portable Memory Management Toolkit in Rust. Zixian Cai, Brenda Wang and Pavel Zakopaylo. Sydney Area Programming Languages INterest Group (SAPLING), 2018.

Have Your Cake and Eat It? Productive Parallel Programming via Chapel’s High-level Constructs. Zixian Cai. ANU PhB Symposium, 2018 for SCNC2101.

Micro Virtual Machines. Zixian Cai. ANU PhB Mini Symposium, 2018.

Mu for Dynamic Languages: Retargeting the RPython JIT to a Micro Virtual Machine. Zixian Cai. Sydney Area Programming Languages INterest Group (SAPLING), 2017.