Dr Tom Spink

Lecturer

Researcher profile

Phone

+44 (0)1334 46 3335

Email

tcs6@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Teaching

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.

Research areas

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.

PhD supervision

• Ferdia McKeogh
• Sing Hin To

Selected publications

• Open access

  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

  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

  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

  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

  Accelerating shared library execution in a DBT

  Spink, T. & Franke, B., 20 Jun 2024, Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED International Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES'24): June 24, 2024, Copenhagen, Denmark. New York, NY: ACM, p. 1-11 11 p.

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

• Fast and effective embedded systems design: from bits and bytes to IoT, with the Arm Mbed

  Wilmshurst, T., Toulson, R. & Spink, T., 1 May 2024, 3rd ed. Amsterdam: Newnes.

  Research output: Book/Report › Book

• Open access

  Lasagne: a static binary translator for weak memory model architectures

  Rocha, R. C. O., Sprokholt, D., Fink, M., Gouicem, R., Spink, T., Chakraborty, S. & Bhatotia, P., 9 Jun 2022, Proceedings of the 43rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2022). ACM, p. 888–902 15 p.

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

• Open access

  Leaps and bounds: analysing WebAssembly’s performance with a focus on bounds checking

  Szewczyk, R., Stonehouse, K., Barbalace, A. & Spink, T., 6 Nov 2022, Proceedings of the 2022 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization. Online: IEEE, p. 256-268 13 p.

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

• Open access

  Risotto: a dynamic binary translator for weak memory model architectures

  Gouicem, R., Sprokholt, D., Ruehl, J., Rocha, R., Spink, T., Chakraborty, S. & Bhatotia, P., 21 Dec 2022, Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 1 (ASPLOS 2023). Aamodt, T. M., Jerger, N. E. & Swift, M. (eds.). New York, NY: ACM, Vol. 1. p. 107–122 16 p.

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

• Open access

  A retargetable system-level DBT hypervisor

  Spink, T., Wagstaff, H. & Franke, B., 30 May 2020, In: ACM Transactions on Computer Systems. 36, 4, p. 1-24

  Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

 

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