PhD thesis (unfinished) was undertaken at Sydney University from 1981 to 1989. This work involved the design of Styx, a model for a distributed object system. This work had many applications in the areas of user interfaces, heterogeneous distributed systems, programming environments, and device independent systems, and predated research systems such as Eden and Emerald, and commercial systems such as Microsoft’s COM/DCOM.

Research work at the University of New South Wales involves the design and implementation of the Mungi distributed 64-bit single address space operating system (Russell et al, 1992). Important research issues currently under investigation include network security, robustness and stability, distribution and consistency control, supporting object-oriented databases, and user-level naming services.

Other work at UNSW included the development of novel address translation techniques to reduce lookup latency for physically indexed primary CPU caches. This work resulted in a provisional Australian patent.

Other research interests include microprocessor systems, communication systems, computer architectures, embedded systems, programming languages and compiler construction.