Jimmy Kwa
Software Developer at IBM
Markham, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJimmy Kwa is a software developer at IBM with nine years of experience specializing in compiler development, FPGA-based Network-on-Chip design, and performance engineering. He holds an M.A.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UBC and is skilled in Verilog/VHDL, Quartus II/ModelSim, C++, Java, Python, and Ruby. At IBM and in open-source projects like Eclipse OMR and OpenJ9 he has focused on low-level optimizations—adding SIMD/vector instruction support, improving register assignment, and tuning JIT/compiler heuristics for platform-specific performance. His background spans QA automation and teaching, giving him a practical appreciation for tooling, reproducible builds, and clear technical communication. Colleagues rely on him for tricky concurrency and performance fixes that bridge hardware-aware design and production compilers.
9 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
Master of Applied Science (M.A.Sc.), Electrical and Computer Engineering, Master of Applied Science (M.A.Sc.), Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of British Columbia / UBC
Github Skills (27)
assembly10
c-language10
jvm10
architecture10
computer-architecture10
cpu-architecture10
vectorization10
java10
x8610
javas10
code-generation10
omr10
compiler-optimization10
performance-tuning10
simd10
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
eclipse-omr/omr
Oct 2016 - Nov 2020
Eclipse OMR™ Cross platform components for building reliable, high performance language runtimes
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:49 reviews, 33 commits, 32 PRs in 4 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Jimmy primarily contributed to the Eclipse OMR™ runtime, focusing on optimizing and extending vector support for code generation, particularly on the x86 architecture. Their work involved adding new instructions, improving existing evaluators for vector operations (add, sub, mul, div), and fixing bugs in existing vector implementations. They also modified the register assignment process for better handling of vector registers and SIMD operations, as well as added code to support features like prefteching.
jitruntimesomrruntimeportability
eclipse-openj9/openj9
Oct 2017 - Jul 2022
Eclipse OpenJ9: A Java Virtual Machine for OpenJDK that's optimized for small footprint, fast start-up, and high throughput. Builds on Eclipse OMR (https://github.com/eclipse/omr) and combines with the Extensions for OpenJDK for OpenJ9 repo.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Performance Engineer
Back-end Developer & Performance EngineerContributions:57 reviews, 31 commits, 50 PRs in 4 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Jimmy primarily contributed to the optimization and bug fixing of the Eclipse OpenJ9 JVM. Their work focused on improving performance through changes to the compiler, including adjusting thresholds for polymorphic calls and modifying prefetching logic. They addressed concurrency issues with fixes for race conditions related to J2I thunk tables. Further contributions included implementing support for software concurrent scavenge on Power architecture, and enhancements for JIT pinning support, indicating a focus on platform-specific optimizations and overall system performance.
runtimecompilerextensionseclipseomr
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