Minas Charalambides

My research aims at making parallel and distributed programming easier. The "dream" consists of a unified programming model for all architectures capable of supporting multiple runtime threads/processes. To this end, my work lies on the intersection of the areas of programming languages, formal methods and high performance computing. I am currently focused on the actor model of computation, looking at two main directions: ease of programming and performance optimizations.

Towards the goal of ease of programming, my current focus is the problem of actor coordination. Through the type-theoretic notion of session types, I wish to bring the benefits of static typing to the world of distributed computing. The basic idea is to catch errors resulting from incompatible communication patterns at compilation time, reporting relevant type errors.

The project I currently spend most of my time on is about the automatic garbage collection of actors. In a parallel computation, automatically detecting which actors are no longer needed is a non trivial problem, so that all solutions proposed so far exhibit major runtime overhead. My research aims towards a faster (automatic) solution to this problem, through a combination of static analysis techniques and session type theory.

Prior to joining the Open Systems Laboratory, I worked on the automatic derivation of optimal execution plans for XML queries, while at the department on Computer Science of the Athens University of Economics and Business, in Athens, Greece.

Publications