Education
Australian National University (2017-, Canberra, ACT, Australia)
- Bachelor of Philosophy-Science (Honours)
- Major: Computer Science
- Minor: Mathematics
- Thesis advisers: Steve Blackburn, Mike Bond (OSU)
- Received ANU Honours Scholarship of value A$5,000 per annum (15 on offer each year)
Employment
Australian National University (2017-, Canberra, ACT, Australia)
- Research Assistant, Programming Languages and Systems Lab
- I work on the MMTk project, supervised by Steve Blackburn. I am one of the main authors of the Rust port of MMTk, making MMTk available to more runtimes than Jikes RVM.
- I’m the sysadmin of a cluster of machines for high-fidelity performance measurements of software systems.
- I previously worked on the Mu Micro Virtual Machine project, supervised by Steve Blackburn and Tony Hosking. I continued the work of building a Mu backend for the RPython JIT compiler.
Microsoft Research (2020, Canberra, ACT, Australia)
- Contractor, Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) group
- Supervised by Todd Mytkowicz
- Continuing my internship work
Australian National University (2020, Canberra, ACT, Australia)
- Teaching Assistant, Research School of Computer Science
- See ANU COMP3710, Compiler Design and Implementation (2020 Semester 1)
Microsoft Research (2019-2020, Redmond, WA, USA)
- Research Intern, Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) group
- Mentored by Todd Mytkowicz
- I worked on SCCL (Synthesized Collective Communication Library). I built a compiler for MPI-style collective operations, lowering a high level specification into efficient CUDA code. It’s written up here.
Publications
Preprints
Synthesizing Optimal Collective Algorithms (2020) pdf arXiv
- under submission
- by Zixian Cai, Zhengyang Liu, Saeed Maleki, Madan Musuvathi, Todd Mytkowicz, Jacob Nelson, Olli Saarikivi (Zixian Cai and Zhengyang Liu contributed equally to the paper)
Technical Reports
Activity Recognition in Videos with Segmented Streams (2019) pdf doi
- for ANU SCNC2103
- by Zixian Cai, supervised by Stephen Gould
Verification of Concurrent Data Structures with TLA (2018) pdf doi
- for ANU SCNC2102
- by Zixian Cai, supervised by Michael Norrish
Power Consumption of Instruction Encodings on Cortex-M4 (2018) pdf doi
- for ANU COMP2300 ASE
- by Zixian Cai, supervised by Ben Swift
Have Your Cake and Eat It? Productive Parallel Programming via Chapel’s High-level Constructs (2018) pdf doi
- for ANU SCNC2101
- by Zixian Cai, supervised by Josh Milthorpe
Talks
Activity Recognition in Videos with Segmented Streams (2019)
- by Zixian Cai
- at ANU PhB Symposium for SCNC2103
Portable Memory Management Toolkit in Rust (2018)
- by Zixian Cai, Brenda Wang and Pavel Zakopaylo
- at SAPLING18
Have Your Cake and Eat It? Productive Parallel Programming via Chapel’s High-level Constructs (2018)
- by Zixian Cai
- at ANU PhB Symposium for SCNC2101
Micro Virtual Machines (2018)
- by Zixian Cai
- at ANU PhB Mini Symposium
Mu for Dynamic Languages: Retargeting the RPython JIT to a Micro Virtual Machine (2017)
- by Zixian Cai
- at SAPLING17
Awards
ANU Chancellor’s Letter of Commendation (2017, 2018, 2019)
ANU Burton and Garran Hall Distinguished Scholar Award (2017, 2018, 2019)
Teaching
ANU COMP3710, Compiler Design and Implementation
- in 2020 Semester 1
- Teaching Assistant
- Course Convener: Tony Hosking
- Lecturer: Ben L. Titzer
- ANU CECS 2020 Remote Teaching and Student Experience Awards Notable Mention for exceptional adaptation to remote delivery of course material