Kinson Chan

You will likely see me thinking and planning quietly, moving computing equipment noisily, or making yuen yeung secretly at a conference coffee corner.

Under my management, CCB High Performance Computing Facility is trusted by hundreds of bioinformaticians across the University and it has recovered its full economic cost. To sustain double-digit annual growth, the infrastructure is organically evolving, round the year, based on user demands, budget, and market conditions.

In my first year of primary school, I came across the word “Oxford” as in “Oxford University Press”. I recognised it would be a nice place, and I subconsciously reached here as a professional service staff.

I studied cluster computing and software transactional memory with the Gideon 300 and its successor, at the University of Hong Kong. My distributed transactional memory system implemented on top of message passing interface gave me valuable hands-on experience of how modern distributed systems maintain coherence and consistency.

I later joined the leading high performance computing provider in Hong Kong for various meteorology, education, and banking settings. In additional to the leadership roles, I was the point of reference for various distributed storage systems and the accompanying high-availability infrastructures.

Having worked on both the supplier and customer sides, I have a holistic perspective of the entire infrastructure lifecycle, from market survey to decommission. This enables me to make critical judgement to technical claims, negotiate constructively, and discover cost-effective solutions.

In the years to come, I will strive to provide useful computing service to the University members, and more importantly, foster insightful medical research impacts that heal people in need.

Cache Affinity Optimization Techniques for Scaling Software Transactional Memory Systems on Multi-CMP Architectures
Kinson Chan, King Tin Lam, and Cho-Li Wang (2015)

Distributed Software Transactional Memory with Clock Validation on Clusters (Thesis)
Kinson Chan (2013)

Decentralized Software Transactional Memory for Multi-Multicore Computers
Kinson Chan and Cho-Li Wang (2011)

Adaptive Thread Scheduling Techniques for Improving Scalability of Software Transactional Memory
Kinson Chan, King Tin Lam, and Cho-Li Wang (2011)

An Adaptive Software Transactional Memory Support for Multi-core Programming (Thesis)
Kinson Chan (2009)