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  • School of Computer Science, North Haugh, St Andrews, Fife, KY16 9SS, UK

Accepting Postgraduate Research Students

PhD projects

JIT-Compilation-as-a-Service, Cross-architecture Virtual Machine Hypervisor, IoT Virtualisation, Unikernels, Distributed virtualisation, Operating Systems, Hardware acceleration

Personal profile

Research overview

My research lies in the area of efficient cross-architecture hardware virtualisation - or techniques to efficiently emulate a full computer architecture on a different host.  Dynamic Binary Translation is the key underlying technology that I'm investigating, and I've been working on how we can use hardware acceleration to make this process more efficient, ultimately improving the performance of a virtualised system.

Research interests

I'm generally interested in the area of computer systems, specifically:

  • Operating Systems
  • Virtualisation
  • Compilers
  • Runtime systems

Academic/Professional Qualification

I have a BEng (Hons) in Software Engineering, and a PhD in computer systems architecture, both from the University of Edinburgh.

I am also a Fellow of the BCS.

Teaching activity

In AY 25/26, I'm teaching CS3104 - Operating Systems in S1, and CS4202 - Computer Architecture in S2.

I am the First-level CS Coordinator.

Profile Keywords

Dynamic Binary Translation, Hardware Virtualisation, Operating Systems, Runtimes, Compilers

Education/Academic qualification

Doctor of Philosophy, Efficient Cross-architecture Hardware Virtualisation

1 Jan 2013 → 31 Dec 2016

Award Date: 11 Jul 2017

Bachelor of Engineering, Software Engineering, University of Edinburgh

Award Date: 7 Jul 2008

Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):

  1. SDG 7 - Affordable and Clean Energy
    SDG 7 Affordable and Clean Energy

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  • 1 Similar Profiles

Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years

Recent external collaboration on country/territory level. Dive into details by clicking on the dots or
  • Arancini: a hybrid binary translator for weak memory model architectures

    Reimers, S., Sprokholt, D., Fink, M., Augoustis, T., Kammermeier, S., Rocha, R. C. O., Spink, T., Gouicem, R., Chakraborty, S. & Bhatotia, P., 22 Mar 2026, Proceedings of the 31st ACM international conference on architectural support for programming languages and operating systems (ASPLOS'26). New York, NY: ACM, Vol. 2. p. 157-174 18 p.

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

    Open Access
    File
  • Scalable decode caching in multi-core instruction set simulators

    Kristien, M., Franke, B., Topham, N., Böhm, I., Wagstaff, H. & Spink, T., 16 Mar 2026, Proceedings of the rapid simulation and performance evaluation for design workshop (RAPIDO '26). New York, NY: ACM, p. 14-21 8 p.

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

    Open Access
    File
  • TrueJIT: learning and prediction of compilation sequences in a centralized JIT compiler

    Khordadi, A., Stonehouse, K., Spink, T. & Franke, B., 11 Aug 2026, Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGPLAN international conference on managed programming languages and runtimes (MPLR '26). Ducasse, S. & Scholliers, C. (eds.). New York, NY: ACM, p. 31-42

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

    Open Access
    File
  • Propagating C++ exceptions across the user/kernel boundary

    Voronetskiy, D. & Spink, T., 13 Oct 2025, Proceedings of the 13th workshop on programming languages and operating systems (PLOS '25). New York, NY: ACM, p. 101-107 7 p.

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

    Open Access
    File
  • Pydrofoil: accelerating Sail-based instruction set simulators

    Bolz-Tereick, C. F., Panayi, L., McKeogh, F., Spink, T. & Berger, M., 25 Jun 2025, 39th European conference on object-oriented programming (ECOOP 2025). Aldrich, J. & Silva, A. (eds.). Saarbrücken/Wadern: Schloss Dagstuhl- Leibniz-Zentrum fur Informatik GmbH, Dagstuhl Publishing, p. 3:1-3:31 31 p. (Leibniz international proceedings in informatics (LIPIcs); vol. 333).

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

    Open Access
    File
  • Best Paper Award

    Kristien, M. (Recipient), Franke, B. (Recipient), Topham, N. (Recipient), Boehm, I. (Recipient), Wagstaff, H. (Recipient) & Spink, T. (Recipient), 27 Jan 2026

    Prize: Prize (including medals and awards)

  • Best Paper Award

    Spink, T. (Recipient), Wagstaff, H. (Recipient) & Franke, B. (Recipient), 10 Jul 2019

    Prize: Prize (including medals and awards)