Richard Gorton

161 Temple St.

Framingham, MA

01701

(508) 820-7672

http://gorton-machine.org/rick/professional/resume.html

General goals:Positions utilizing my technical and creative abilities to convert blue sky ideas into usable tools and products.

Skills: Interception and manipulation of system semantics at the instruction, library interface, and system call levels, both inside the kernel and in user space. Specifically, binary translators, binary optimizers, compilers, interpreters, and behavior-based security systems. C,C++ and various assembly languages.

Executive Summary: Over the years, I have built and shipped a lot of products which are either first-of-their-kind, or very early (in terms of the overall industry). Lots of advanced product development work. I have no particular desire to spend a lot of time working on minor changes/enhancements to a mature software product. Generally, I get hired to design and implement significant subsystems (mostly in user-space runtimes) where correctness requirements are very high, because the code is being used for all applications on the system.

Experience:

March, 2007 to present: AMD

GPU Developer tools & OpenCL work:May, 2010 - present
With the cancellation of the DynOpt project, was transferred into the GPU Developer tools group, to help with an in-flight OpenCL Debugger. Learning OpenCL, wrote a from-scratch OpenCL app, contributed to adding cpu-side image support to AMD's implementation of OpenCL. Converted a customer provided CUDA benchmark to OpenCL.
Lots of focus on using Visual Studio and learning a lot more C++ Working on "the back end" (internals) of an OpenCL kernel debugger, primarily focused on automated testing thereof. Conceptually, this is a patch-the-IL-and-resubmit-to-lower-level-compilers approach, and is not an interpreter or hardware-level debugger. Wrote a test sequencer which works via api interposition, and is transparent to application code (that is, arbitrary applications can be caused to become tests, without requiring recompilation). Wrote build environment for Linux (scons), hooked it (and automated unit testing for the "back end") into Jenkins (Continuous Integration system).
First in the industry: A debugger capable of operating on OpenCL kernels.

Dynamic Optimizer: March, 2007-April, 2010
Developer for a cancelled Dynamic Binary Optimizer product.
Utilizes on-chip performance counters to determine and optimize "hot" regions of application code. Runs on 64-bit Linux systems, and various Windows systems. Technically, it was an out-of-process, non-persistent DBO. Architected & implemented various subsystems: code cache, inter-component messaging and block patcher (for experimental code replacements) in the server; most of the agent code (injected as an additional thread at process startup); wrote the User Guide. Also initiated & managed our source migration to a central source server and subsequent off-shore creation of a Windows installer.
The runtime agent code had statistical data collection and primitive logging facilities, performed code patching, jacketing/interposition of various system APIs relevant to our dynamic optimizer on both Linux and Windows. Researched and developed a dynamic whole program path profiler (as a PIN tool to help validate our region selection. Various other utility tasks such as benchmarking, patching binary-only applications (PovRay) so that it would work in our benchmark harness; extending our build environment (scons), etc.
A significant amount of research and investigative prototyping was required by all of the team members.
Early in industry: A whole program path profiler, capable of collecting and storing the complete i-stream trace of significant applications (upwards of 10^12 instructions) with minimal slowdowns and without requiring enormous system resources to collect and store the trace. Previous mechanisms are largely unpublished (as in trade-secret or research) efforts used by processor researchers at semiconductor corporations.
Early in industry: There are still no known instances of product grade stand-alone DBO systems shipping.

Architected, implemented and released (in early 2008) a vector string library (libsst) which improves SPECweb performance by 3%-5%. On string performance benchmarks, some of the routines showed more than an order of magnitude improvement in speed. As a note, this is a system saturation benchmark; a 5% improvement is equivalent to a processor speed 'bump', worth hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue (citation: AMD's CEO commenting on the net value of a speed 'bump' at internal presentations)

Oct, 2001 to March, 2007: Cisco Systems, Inc. (formerly Okena, Inc.)
Early in industry: There was a 1999 paper published about the taxonomy of Host Intrusion Prevention systems; it is believed that Okena was the first to ship such a software product. A large portion of my work was the design and development of various components for the Solaris and Linux versions of the product.

Architected and implemented UNIX user-space buffer overflow protection mechanisms for Cisco Security Agent, a Host Intrusion Prevention product.

Implemented various in-kernel system call interceptors and call-chain evaluation code.

Maintain and enhanced rule language compiler and interpreter. The interpreter was used both in-kernel, and in user-space.

Developed various security policies for both Windows and UNIX; consultant to other business units wishing to develop custom security policies for their IP telephony appliances. Enhanced various mechanisms including: web-server application plug-in filters, network properties (@csanode), DRM-related properties (@sensitive).

Architected and implemented prototype Data Leakage plugin partner API.

Aug, 2000 to Aug, 2001: API NetWorks, Inc

Developed and maintained system-level software, including device drivers, system exercisers, and Linux kernel code for API's systems (single and dual processor 21264 Alpha).

Extended and maintained a flash driver/upgrade utility package.
Project leader for a manufacturing & burn-in stress test sytem. Debugged and created Linux kernel patches for problems uncovered by the burn-in system

Created a set of Linux kernel patches which boosted kernel performance by 40% via assembly language tuning; wrote an article describing how it was achieved.

May, 1992 to July, 2000: Compaq Computer Corp (Digital Equipment Corp.)
Developer and Manager in an advanced development group attached to Digital's Semiconductor organization. Initially focused on constructing migration tools for Alpha, then extended to building prototypes and enabler tools for the StrongARM architecture as well. Various projects included:

Dynamic binary optimization project initiator & leader:
Research the feasibility and value of dynamic binary optimization. Objective is to determine how to build a system which will transparently, automatically, and dynamically improve performance of arbitrary binary applications, through architectural, micro-architectural, and value specialization optimizations. Wrote initial concept white paper, defined goals, devised and implemented experiments to determine feasibility, practicality, and various technical aspects of a dynamic binary optimization system. The proof-of-concept system was demonstrated in September, 1998 at a corporate analysts briefing, and showed a speedup of 8%. The work resulted in being an invited speaker at HotChips 11.
First in the industry: An attempt at a product grade DBO.

StrongARM 1500 GNU tools project leader & developer:
Modify the GNU tools (gcc and gas) to support the coprocessor instructions on the SA1500, and to generate code sequences using these instructions. Modified GCC 2.8.1 to generate the coprocessor instructions and was a mentor for the developer modifying the assembler. The modified tools were delivered ahead of business schedule, prior to the availability of functioning silicon. The tools were further modified to work around pass 1 processor bugs. The delivered tools enabled the bootstrapping of a prototype board featuring NetBSD, Dolby AC-3, and MPEG-2 decoding.. Also wrote multiple articles about using the GNU tools for a customer newsletter.

GCC developer:
Benchmarked, analyzed, and modified egcs on Alpha, resulting in a 5% SPECint95 performance improvement under Digital UNIX.

Ported the sound driver subsytem from Linux/x86 to Linux/Alpha (kernel 1.3.57)

Supervised five developers doing advanced development for a year. The StrongARM projects were collaborative efforts with a corporate research group in Palo Alto, my group, and various developers in the UK. The Linux/Alpha platform development work was done jointly with developers in the UK. The projects supervised were:
1. GCC/StrongARM enhancement for the StrongARM 1500 (FPU support)
2. Java JIT/JVM on StrongARM development.
3. Linux/Alpha platform development work.
4. Profile-directed binary translation research.
5. Ongoing support for two binary translator products.
6. JavaOS/StrongARM proof of concept, through early development.
7. JavaOS/Alpha proof of concept.

SunOS to OSF/1 binary translator co-initiator & V1.0 project leader (FreePort Express)
Co-authored the initial technical and business opportunity proposals; co-developed the proof-of-concept prototype; and was the technical project leader up to the release of version 1.0. FreePort Express was a freely available (over the web) compiler-like tool which converts SunOS 4 (aka Solaris 1.x) applications into Digital UNIX executables. At the peak of staffing, my development team consisted of 16 engineers, including some in a clean-room environment.
First in the industry: An endian-converting binary translator capable of handling generic executables as input.
First at Digital: The first software product at Digital made available solely on the internet.

Prototype big-endian to little-endian binary translator project leader and developer. Project goals were two fold: an investigative effort to determine feasibility of endian-converting binary translators, and to create a porting tool for a single application for a customer. A working, usable tool was delivered to the customer ahead of schedule, and enabled them to run their application on Alpha systems.
First in the industry: An endian-converting binary translator

MIPS Ultrix to DEC OSF/1 binary translator developer and project leader (mx). Developer on a small team: debugged and extended the translator and runtime; implemented and ran test suites; performed performance analysis; implemented performance improvements; and packaged the software using Digital's installation tool. Project leader for V1.1, and V1.2 (current). Translated benchmarks exceeded native performance at the initial release of OSF/1 systems.
First in the industry: an automatic (not requiring expert knowledge of the application) binary translator for *IX source and targets.
First at Digital: The binary translators our group worked on were the first software products given away freely at Digital.

Oct, 1985 to May, 1992: Liant Software Corp. - http://www.liant.com

Project leader for PL/I, FORTRAN, BASIC, and Pascal compilers.

Maintained and enhanced front-ends and language runtime libraries, improved QA suites, and released updates.

Improved performance for a number of UNIX platforms, including boosting SPARC and 88000 benchmarks by 2x-4x via peepholing, instruction inlining, leaf routine frame removal, and inline block data movement. Integrated a prototype instruction scheduler, doubling its compile-time performance in the process.

Lead developer for a large, time critical project, requiring the rehosting of six compilers and a debugger; the products were all delivered on schedule. Most of the work was getting the compiler back-end to generate correct code sequences and object files.

Tools developer - maintained in-house development toolchain including source code control system, build system, and other tools used to develop compilers.

Team member for the PRIMOS to SunOS development environment migration.

Ported Liant’s compilers and debugger to a wide variety of UNIX systems.
Completed 3 of the "4 Ports of the Apocalypse" as a member of the porting group: Initial port of a compiler to a new platform, Initial port of the Debugger, a port of RPG II, and porting the compilers/debugger to a foreign language machine. As in all of the output from all the utilities is in a language other than English.

Jan, 1985 to September, 1985: Boston Systems Office

Worked as part of a team writing a new generation of VAX to 68K cross development tools.

May, 1983: B. Sc. Applied Computer Science, University of Wisconsin Parkside

Patents, Publications & advisories:

Linux Journal (Aug, 2001) Kernel Korner article: boosting kernel performance

HotChips 11 (Aug, 1999) Wiggins/Redstone: an online program specializer
An associated (presumed dead as of 2010) patent application: computing path profiles

Security advisory: discoverer of CERT-2006-1174 (useradd)

Dynamic Whole Program Profiling: dynamic whole program [path] profiling. Also at http://developer.amd.com/documentation/articles/assets/gorton_profiling.pdf
Isometric Paths: some notes about Isometric Paths. Also in ODF format.

US Patents: 7721281, 8024719

Other:

Director, Gorton Studios, Inc. Eagan, Minnesota

Endowment founder: Gorton Endowment for the Sciences, The Prairie School, Racine, WI

Endowment founder: CS2100 Endowment (Computer Science) University of Wisconsin Parkside, Kenosha, WI