Foivos Zakkak

Foivos Zakkak is a Software Engineer at Red Hat’s Java platform team, focusing on Mandrel, GraalVM, and Quarkus. Previously, he held academic roles including Research Associate and Research Software Engineer at the Advanced Processor Technologies (APT) group at the University of Manchester, and Postdoctoral Researcher at the Computer Architecture and VLSI Systems Laboratory (CARV) of FORTH-ICS. He holds a PhD, MSc, and BSc in Computer Science from the University of Crete.

His research interests center around Process Virtual Machines, Managed Runtime Systems, Garbage Collection, and Systems Software. Key projects include leading the Maxine VM (a metacircular Java-in-Java VM), developing DiSquawk (a JVM for non-cache-coherent architectures), and contributions to task-based runtime systems like TPC, BDDT, and PARTEE. His work spans optimizing managed applications for NUMA architectures and reducing memory pressure in big data frameworks.

Publications include studies on NUMA system performance, memory analysis of Java benchmarks, and JIT compilation on ARM architectures. His technical expertise extends to system software development and performance engineering.