Jason Patterson

BCompSc (Hons) (Bond), working on PhD...

PhD student at QUT, and owner of PattoSoft, a small software development company.

Email: jason@pattosoft.com.au

Born: July 3, 1972
Height: 183 cm (6'0")
Weight: 85 kg (187 lb)

Research Papers
& Tech Reports

Non-Technical
Articles

GhostScript GUI &
Solaris lp Support

Computer Related Interests

My primary interest is the area of code optimization, especially at the very global (interprocedural) level. I'm particularly interested in aggressively superscalar RISC processors (such as the Alpha 21264, UltraSPARC and PowerPC 750) and the optimizations needed to exploit them (such as global instruction scheduling, very global register allocation and instruction/data cache optimizations). My PhD thesis will be entitled "VGO: A Very Global Optimizer", and will probably be completed in 1999/2000. I could tell you more, but then I'd have to kill you :-)

My other main interest is computer graphics, and especially 3D graphics. It's been great to watch the dramatic increase in performance and decrease in cost of recent 3D graphics hardware, such as Silicon Graphics' IMPACT and Sun's 3DRAM. This, combined with the incorporation of graphics instructions directly into the CPU (such as Sun's VIS and Intel's MMX), and the gradual adoption of VRML into the world wide web, means that the age of 3D graphics for the masses is almost upon us! All we need now is an affordable VR headset and a cheap data glove...

I'm also interested in most low level topics dealing with both hardware and software, such as spiffy new hardware, the internals of operating systems, and programming languages and environments. Some high level topics which interest me include data structures, operations research, user interfaces, networking, computer/network security, and AI.

Finally, I'm interested in flight simulation. Someday I'll write the ultimate flight simulator...

SEE ALSO: My Computing Background and the History of Computers During My Lifetime

Other (Real-World) Interests

I'm interested in aviation in general, and especially aerobatics. I will definitely get my pilots license when I can manage to get some spare time. That'll be fun :-)

I also enjoy playing and listening to music (both modern and classical), and participating in various sports such as basketball, swimming, water skiing, tennis, squash, sailing, baseball and Australian rules football.