Professor Simpson writes

Why CMAJ writes editorials.

Steve Simpson

Steve Simpson was born and grew up in Australia. After completing his undergraduate degree at the University of Queensland, he travelled to London where he undertook his PhD on locust feeding physiology. Steve then spent 22 years in Oxford, fi rst in Experimental Psychology and then in the Department of Zoology and the Natural History Museum, before being enticed back to Australia in 2005. Toge...

Truly Non-blocking Writes

Writing data within user or operating system memory often encounters the classic read-before-write problem whereby the page written to must first be read from the backing store, effectively blocking the writing process before modifications are made. Unfortunately, the large gap between memory and storage access performance adversely affects workloads that require substantial readbefore-write op...

Non-blocking Writes to Files

Writing data to a page not present in the file-system page cache causes the operating system to synchronously fetch the page into memory first. Synchronous page fetch defines both policy (when) and mechanism (how), and always blocks the writing process. Non-blocking writes eliminate such blocking by buffering the written data elsewhere in memory and unblocking the writing process immediately. S...

Channing and Simpson in Edinburgh

In August of 1852 Dr. Walter Channing, professor of obstetrics and medical jurisprudence at Harvard Medical School, was about to finish an extensive tour of Europe, having left Boston early in May of that year. He was sixtysix at the time, and almost a half century had passed since his previous trip to that continent where as a medical student he studied in Edinburgh and London. The trip had ta...